Synopses & Reviews
Wolfwatching was the fourteenth collection published by Ted Hughes (1930-98), England's former Poet Laureate. In it, we encounter several poems that feature his typically striking yet somber exactitude, a style of perception and depiction always unclouded by sentiment. Other poems find Hughes returning to the Yorkshire landscape of his childhood, recounting the tragic effects of World War I, or revisiting the dire plight of that region's coal miners and textile workers.
Wolfwatching is an unflinching book about the struggles of this world, struggles both physical and spiritual, both in and out of nature.
Review
"The poetry of Ted Hughes has brought us, in the most exact sense, closer to nature, its complete workings, than any English poet we can think of, including Clare and Hardy. Not because it is brutal, but because it is brutal and bright; otherwise all we would have would be morose accuracy, the diray of a depressed naturalist. [
Wolfwatching] is a poetry of exultation."--Derek Walcott,
The Weekend Telegraph"Wolfwatching represents Ted Hughes at his informal best."--The Times (London)
"For Hughes the English language is not so much a tool as an arsenal. . . . Time and again in Wolfwatching it is moving to watch him use verbal weapons, his clashing and meshing sound clusters, to plead for a collective clemency toward animals, a grown child's forgiveness for unhappy parents, a soldier's forgetfulness of battle."--Mary Jo Salter, The New Republic
Synopsis
Wolfwatching, Ted Hughes's fourteenth collection of poetry, contains several characteristic poems, in which nature is presented with striking exactitude, unclouded by sentiment. But Hughes breaks new ground with a number of intimate and unforgettable poems that memorialize members of his family as they were in his youth, in the years following the First World War.
About the Author
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.