Beyond Promising

25 Ramadhan, 1441

Now firmly embarked on a read-through of Ted Hughes: Collected Poems. Almost finished his earliest collection from 1957, The Hawk in the Rain, a book I know very well indeed. I can't remember exactly when I bought it as a paperback, but I do know that I thought extremely highly of it in its entirety. Not so sure I admire it in totality quite as much now. I suppose back then I was just intoxicated by the special, stunningly direct qualities of the verse and found something worthwhile in every poem. Now, more familiar with Hughes's voice, I'm a bit more picky and can see when he seems to be posing and just going through the motions.

But when whole poems work, and a remarkable number do, I find myself just as intoxicated as I ever was. Just think, in the first five poems of the collection we get four stone-cold, unarguable classics: The Hawk in the Rain, The Jaguar, The Thought-Fox and The Horses. Good grief - in his first collection!

Funnily enough, one poem that's a sort of personal favourite, the ballad-like Roarers in a Ring, seems rarely mentioned in the critical literature on TH. Reading it again after several years I'm struck by how it confirms the poet's mastery of rhythm and rhyme, his gift for which he rarely exploited in any obvious way (except, perhaps, in the verse he wrote for children - a reminder of his extraordinary range.)