Bøker av Ted Hughes

Originally published in 1979, Moortown Diary is the updated version of Ted Hughes's acclaimed Devon farming sequence, written over a period of several years during which he was spending almost every day outside, either gardening or farming. The introduction and notes (added in 1989) sketch in the background from which these remarkable poems emerged as an improvised verse journal, sparely edited, coalescing spontaneously on the page. 'Moortown Diary keeps its eye firmly on the creatures behind the language. It's written in the style of Hughes's play translations: very swift and bright and urgent and speakable...Hughes strips away the protective layers - the soundproofed ears, the double-glazed eyes - that prevent us making contact with anything outside ourselves. Right now, I can't think of anything more important than that kind of poem. Because we're not just here to think about literature. We're here to try to wake up.' Alice Oswald, The Guardian'It grips your heart, and your intestines, like a vice from the first page. He makes language as physical as a bruise, and in these poems beauty and tenderness blend with violence.' John Carey, Sunday Times'The Moortown sequence includes some of Hughes's finest poems...They are like no other poems I have read, with a degree of intensity, sanity and grace that he has never equalled.' Anthony Thwaite, Times Literary Supplement

An adaptation by the Poet Laureate of Racine's play of the same name. Phedre burns with passion for Hippolytus, her stepson. His father, Theseus, is made to believe that it is Hippolytus who is lusting after Phedre, and begs Neptune to kill his son, which he does before discovering the truth.

When Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun's ground-breaking anthology After Ovid (also Faber) was published in 1995, Hughes's three contributions to the collective effort were nominated by most critics as outstanding. He had shown that rare translator's gift for providing not just an accurate account of the original, but one so thoroughly imbued with his own qualities that it was as if Latin and English poetwere somehow the same person. Tales from Ovid, which went on to win the Whitbread Prize for Poetry, continued the project of recreation with 24 passages, including the stories of Phaeton, Actaeon, Echo and Narcissus, Procne, Midas and Pyramus and Thisbe. In them, Hughes's supreme narrative and poetic skills combine to produce a book that stands, alongside his Crow and Gaudete, as an inspired addition to the myth-making of our time.

A collection of twenty-eight poems grouped to represent the four seasons.

First published in 1962 this selection, made by the poets themselves, draws on the volumes they had published up to that date and forms a valuable introduction to their work.

Crow was Ted Hughes's fourth book of poems for adults and a pivotal moment in his writing career. In it, he found both a structure and a persona that gave his vision a new power and coherence. A deep engagement with history, mythology and the natural world combine to forge a work of impressive and unsettling force. 'English poetry has found a new hero and nobody will be able to read or write verse now without the black shape of Crow falling across the page.' Peter Porter

Published in 1957, Hawk in the Rain was Ted Hughes's first collection of poems. It won the New York Poetry Centre First Publication Award, for which the judges were W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Marianne Moore, and the Somerset Maugham Award, and it was acclaimed by every reviewer from A. Alvarez to Edwin Muir. When Robin Skelton wrote, 'All looking for the emergence of a major poet must buy it', he was right to see in it the promise of what many now regard as the most important body of work by any poet of the twentieth century.

For the first time, the vast canon of the poetry of Ted Hughes - winner of the Whitbread and Forward Prizes and former Poet Laureate - together in a single e-book.The Collected Poems spans fifty years of work, from Hawk in the Rain to the best-selling Birthday Letters. It also includes the complete texts of such seminal publications as Crow and Tales from Ovid as well as those children's poems that Hughes felt crossed over into adult poetry. Most significantly it also includes small press publications and editions that, until now, remain uncollected and have never before been available to a general readership. 'A guardian spirit of the land and language.' Seamus Heaney

So wrote Ted Hughes in the foreword to this collection, taken from forty years of occasional story-telling. Of the nine items, six are from Wodwo, Hughes's 1967 collection of poems and other writings, while 'The Head' has appeared only in a magazine, and 'The Deadfall' in an anthology of ghost stories.

Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters are addressed, with just two exceptions, to Sylvia Plath, the American poet to whom he was married. They were written over a period of more than twenty-five years, the first a few years after her suicide in 1963, and represent Ted Hughes's only account of his relationship with Plath and of the psychological drama that led both to the writing of her greatest poems and to her death. The book became an instant bestseller on its publication in 1998 and won the Forward Prize for Poetry in the same year. 'To read [Birthday Letters] is to experience the psychic equivalent of "e;the bends"e;. It takes you down to levels of pressure where the undertruths of sadness and endurance leave you gasping.' Seamus Heaney 'Even if it were possible to set aside its biographical value . . . its linguistic, technical and imaginative feats would guarantee its future. Hughes is one of the most important poets of the century and this is his greatest book.' Andrew Motion

From the trembling new-born calf in Season Songs to the gently sleeping one recorded in Moortown Diary, animal life as observed in the pages of Flowers and Insects, Elmet, River, Lupercal and Hawk in the Rain is seen afresh through the diversity and imaginative energy of this collected volume.

'The poem we are told was originally intended as a film scenario. Ted Hughes has that sure poetic instinct that heads implacably for the particular instances rather than ideas or abstraction; he has an especial talent for evoking the visual particular . . . Ted Hughes has produced a strange bastard form that [works] because he has such an acute sense of the suggestive power of specific visual images and the ability to evoke them in words.' Oliver Lyne, Times Literary Supplement

Alcestis is the story of a king, Admetus, who is able to escape death because his wife, Alcestis, has volunteered to die in his place. Ted Hughes's version goes beyond translation to an inspired rethinking of the story in terms of his own vision of human suffering.Although he started working on this piece in 1993, he did not finish until a few months before his death in 1998. It is the culmination of an extraordinarily productive period of work, which saw the publication of Tales from Ovid (1997), Birthday Letters (1998) and The Oresteia (1999).

The authors second collection which prints some of his most revered work including Pike, Hawk Roosting and November.

A collection of prose pieces by the Poet Laureate, on literary matters and on writers as diverse as Emily Dickinson, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Walter de la Mare, T.S. Eliot, Wilfred Owen and Sylvia Plath. Hughes also expresses concerns about education, the environment, and the arts in general.