I've arrived at Wodwo on my read-through of the Hughes's Collected and I'm finding myself reminded of just how deeply troubling, disturbing, unsettling so many of the poems in the book felt when I first read them and remain so today. More so, I think. In youth I had youth to protect me from them and the surreal puzzling quality so many possessed helped provide some distance.
They still puzzle - the weaker ones beyond the redemption of meaning - but the fully achieved pieces now seem to have a power I somehow didn't grasp when younger. Possibly a good thing that I didn't back then. I read Ghost Crabs over the weekend, and again today. Once upon a time I found it fascinating, but essentially saw it as little more than a kind of uncannily animated dream. Now it actually frightens me.
I suppose I used to wonder what the titular crabs represented. Now I know they are real: They are the powers of this world. / We are their bacteria, / Dying their lives and living their deaths.
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