Wolfwatching - Softcover

The British poet, translator, author, and critic Ted Hughes, born in 1930, wrote more than forty books, including, in the last decade of his life, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being; Tales from Ovid; verse adaptations of Aeschylus's Oresteia, Racine's Phèdre, and Euripedes' Alcestis; and the bestselling Birthday Letters. Hughes served as Poet Laureate to Queen Elizabeth II from 1984 until his death in 1998.

Reading Hughes is like visiting a zoo envisioned by Hieronymus Bosch: we're caught between fright and fascination. But for all its terror and strangeness, the menagerie is a real one, its livid grandeur less a product of the imagination than of primal forces of survival--"Sculpted, as are all God's creatures, by hunger." Who but Hughes would describe a horse as "a top-heavy, twangling half ton/ On the stilts of an insect," or characterize the human soul as "A strange thing, with rickets--a hyena"? A retelling of the story of Adam, "Take What You Want But Pay for It," nearly wrenches itself from the page. In his 60th year, England's poet laureate refuses to mellow, dissecting fear and malevolence with an ever sharper blade. His new collection will no doubt cause more than one aspiring poet to cast their pens down in frustration and despair.
- Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib.
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