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  #1  
Unread 08-27-2022, 12:13 PM
David Callin David Callin is offline
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Default A word for Ted Hughes

Hughes came in for some disobliging words on another thread recently. This is not a polemic or a reasoned disagreement. I'd just like to share another of his poems that I have read recently and enjoyed greatly ...

An Otter

Underwater eyes, an eel's
Oil of water body, neither fish nor beast is the otter:
Four-legged yet water-gifted, to outfish fish;
With webbed feet and long ruddering tail
And a round head like an old tomcat.

Brings the legend of himself
From before wars or burials, in spite of hounds and vermin-poles;
Does not take root like the badger. Wanders, cries;
Gallops along land he no longer belongs to;
Re-enters the water by melting.

Of neither water nor land. Seeking
Some world lost when first he dived, that he cannot come at since,
Takes his changed body into the holes of lakes;
As if blind, cleaves the stream's push till he licks
The pebbles of the source; from sea

To sea crosses in three nights
Like a king in hiding. Crying to the old shape of the starlit land,
Over sunken farms where the bats go round,
Without answer. Till light and birdsong come
Walloping up roads with the milk wagon.

The hunt's lost him. Pads on mud,
Among sedges, nostrils a surface bead,
The otter remains, hours. The air,
Circling the globe, tainted and necessary,

Mingling tobacco-smoke, hounds and parsley,
Comes carefully to the sunk lungs.
So the self under the eye lies,
Attendant and withdrawn. The otter belongs

In double robbery and concealment --
From water that nourishes and drowns, and from land
That gave him his length and the mouth of the hound.
He keeps fat in the limpid integument

Reflections live on. The heart beats thick,
Big trout muscle out of the dead cold;
Blood is the belly of logic; he will lick
The fishbone bare. And can take stolen hold

On a bitch otter in a field full
Of nervous horses, but linger nowhere.
Yanked above hounds, reverts to nothing at all,
To this long pelt over the back of a chair.
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  #2  
Unread 08-28-2022, 08:26 AM
Jim Moonan Jim Moonan is offline
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.
I saw those comments that seemed to diminish Ted Hughes's body of work. He indeed has flashed his brilliance in a number of good poems. I sometimes think he (and others) have suffered from 1.) being free verse poets in a universe that still is populated with a kind of literary prejudice that is skeptical of anything that doesn't conform to formulaic poetry, and 2.) living a life that was somewhat controversial in that his marriage to Sylvia Plath was afflicted with problems. To some degree he has been "cancelled", I think, by knee-jerkers.

I've read this poem and love it. Fwiw, I truly love all the poems I love. They are like living things to me, maybe even more so than many other living things : ) You can love a thousand poems and still be true to one love. I call that Love's Loophole : )

I don't think there's much in terms of talent that separates Hughes from Larkin.


---
Editing back in to say I hope I haven't offended those Sylvia Plath devotees who see Ted Hughes perhaps differently than others. I also hope I haven't offended those who revere Larkin. But the fact t of the matter is — and I said so tangentially above — I love poems, not poets.

.

Last edited by Jim Moonan; 08-28-2022 at 03:57 PM.
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Unread 08-28-2022, 04:16 PM
Sarah-Jane Crowson's Avatar
Sarah-Jane Crowson Sarah-Jane Crowson is offline
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I like Hughes' work, although I'm not familiar with all of it.

I'm not sure what the wider arguments are, and I don't know much about Hughes, but I'd expect that his work is of its age, and navigating pathways between cultural ideas of one (particularly when relatively close and the ideas are not malleable) age to another will always be challenging/complex - which is not to be said that they should not be attempted (codicil - unless they're racist or holocaust denying or something equally extremely awful, which I haven't heard about Hughes)

But anyway, anyway, for me any mention of Hughes has a kneejerk response of remembering Baskin's illustrations to Crow, and at last I've found a link to share -

https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O...age=2021MY3083

What the image online doesn't tell you is that these are (in my experience) HUGE pictures - A2 at least, all ink-drawn and terrible in their beauty.

I think of Hughes, perhaps, as a nature poet, a post-war nature poet, where everything is entrails and death, with occasional glimpses of raw wonder. I suspect that might be a reading open to be challenged, though.

Sarah-Jane
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Unread 09-01-2022, 12:39 AM
Cally Conan-Davies Cally Conan-Davies is offline
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What Hughes does in his poetry excites something at the core of me. He is a huge figure in my poetry pantheon. I can't imagine life without 'Crow'. When I first read it, it shattered my ideas about what poetry is, and what it can do.

Thanks for that link, Sarah!

And thanks for 'An Otter', David!
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Unread 09-01-2022, 07:11 AM
John Riley John Riley is offline
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Last edited by John Riley; 09-01-2022 at 09:17 AM.
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