I've avoided reading Ted Hughes because TWO OF HIS WIVES KILLED THEMSELVES BY STICKING THEIR HEADS IN AN OVEN--can you really say, "hmmm...wish I'd seen the signs..." after the SECOND wife sticks her head in the oven? Maybe it really is about YOU, Ted. So, I finally read his poetry because it was part of a gorgeous new set of Faber & Faber poetry editions (which includes Sylvia Plath, one of the aforementioned wives) with specially commissioned artwork. These are fantastic little hardback books

Ted Hughes is my favourite poet and this is a fantastic, but small, collection of the best of his work.Ted Hughes was not only an excellent poet but an accessible one too. Dylan Thomas wrote good poetry but it was often obscure or unclear what he was trying to say. With Hughes you are not left in any doubt yet he still employs the most wonderful, emotively descriptive language I've come across in any writer. He loved the natural world and immersed himself fully in it.Particular favourites are 'H...

Absolutely stunning review and alongside Oscar Wilde and Emily Dickinson, Hughes is one of my all time favourite poets. Hawk Roosting was just genius, a beautiful collection of poetry.

I must say, I prefer Plath to Hughes on the particular English course that I'm doing. I just find his poetry less personal and there's just so much nature involved. Like yeh, we get it, you like crows.

basically i cba to read all these poems at once but technically i'm reading them in lessons when i annotate them so don't attack mep.s. ted hughes is a wanker lol

A broad, varied and insightful collection of Hughes work, deftly selected by Armitage (himself, a poet of similar ilk to Hughes).Some seemed almost repetitive, but then I guess when you're reading one after another, it would appear that way at times.Overall, well worth a read. The last poems from 'The Tender Place' on p.117, are the crème de la crème of his work, and were a dream to immerse myself in.

Most poems in this collection revolved around animals, nature and a few is erotic (to me). I love it and admit he is talented. If i don't know anything about him, i would think he is an amazing person worthy to be idolized.

that one abt the birth of the baby goat/calf/sheep is so cool i wanted to be a welsh farmer for about 10 seconds

I love Sylvia Plath. Her poetry, her novel, even her journals are amazing and raw, beautiful and haunting. Out of interest I sought out this book. It feels sacrilegious to be saying so, but Ted Hughes blows me away. His poetry blew me away. The picture on the front, reflects that a lot of his work is based on animals, the jaguar, the worlf, and some interesting ones where a crow is responsible for man's evil-doings. But the one that resonated strongest with me was the fourth poem in the book (th...

I'm itching to christen Thom Gunn the "Poet of the Hug." His poems, like hugs, are dependable and steady, marked by cool consistency and mellow humanistic sympathies. He has a few poems about hugs, too---most notably, the aptly titled "The Hug," which wistfully describes a platonic embrace shared by two ex-lovers who are now "just friends." There's also the stately lyric "Baucis and Philemon," which contains the lines "Two trunks like bodies, bodies like twined trunks,/Supported by their wooden

4.5 stars.As a collection of ‘highlights’ from throughout Ted Hughes’ body of work, this selection mixes Hughes’ trademark ‘rustic’ style, his more personally-driven poems, and a few other thematic types. It seems like Simon Armitage and I have similar tastes (for Classics, King Arthur, and Ted Hughes) and I generally agree with his choices here. I really enjoyed Midas here and it made me wish there were more from Tales from Ovid in here than just the one (and perhaps more from Crow, which is my...

"It is a particular virtue of Hughes's poetry, and one that he shares with only the very best poets, that clarity and complexity can exist simultaneously, like clear, still water, into which a person can see to a ponderous depth." ~ Simon ArmitageI couldn't put it better myself.

As poets go, Ted Hughes is fairly accessible. His world is the world of nature, of animals, of what I would say are "the natural forces" going against each other. Not always pretty, but beautiful in a way that encapsulates the natural world.I generally believe, from getting a more longer and broader look, that his early poems are better than the later ones. He was Britain's Poet Laureate from 1984 until he passed away in 1998 and I can't say that I find much in those years that interest me. The

Hard-bound editions are always wonderful. Ted Hughes' imagery is out of this world. I love the fact that he can be both cryptic and clear at the same time. His poems can be disturbing at times, but they're raw, and honest, and I love that.With the poems that he's written for Sylvia Plath, you can literally feel the emotion seeping out of the page. It's utterly, utterly magnificent and I hope that I'll be able to write for someone like that one day.

Perhaps the best entry to Hughes' work. The selection is impeccable. The introduction is warm and engaging, never stuffy. It is written by a grown man but powered by the boy who never forgot the impression Ted Hughes made on him.

It is interesting to read Ted Hughes in the era of the #metoo movement. It is pretty well accepted that his relationship with his wife, Sylvia Plath, was tumultuous at best and abusive at its worst; many people accuse him of being one of the main reasons for her suicide. And so, one feels a certain guilt about enjoying his poetry. If the current social movements had been in place in the 1960s and 70s, Hughes would have suffered the fate that so many guilty men today are being given.It is the end...

Like going to a new restaurant in a new city and ordering something extravagently new to you. Eating slowly, and then having coffee. Thank you, Thom Gunn, for bringing that strange land of 1960s 70s San Francisco to me on my Ohio front porch. August Kleinzahler talks about Gunn coming to write more and more of the city, but I heard him caring about what lies around it: the grasses, small birds, dust, clouds, and the naked at the naked beaches.

I just couldn't enjoy any of poems without thinking about the pain he caused Sylvia Plath. So on that note- Hated this. I felt his poems lacked something, I'm not quite sure what it was but it just lacked emotion. Yes we get it... nature is beautiful.

In the "Poet to Poet" series, a contemporary poet advocates a poet of the past or present whom they particularly admire. By their selection of verses and their critical reactions, the selectors offer intriguing insights into their own work. Hughes himself also features in this series as the selector of poetry by a number of poets including Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson and, almost inevitably, Sylvia Plath. The 83 poems in this selection of the poetry of Ted Hughes have been carefully chosen by fe...

One of the texts for my A Level English. I've loved studying Hughes but found I preferred his later stuff (Crow, Birthday Letters) to his earlier poems (Hawk in the Rain, Lupercal, Wodwo). This is a great anthology of his work, really well selected. My favourite poem of his has to be 'Red' (page 135). Incredibly written, deeply affecting. Hughes at his best.