Into Darkness

Now reading the Crow sequences in the Collected Poems of TH. I didn't realise that the poems extended beyond Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow, the book from 1970 that I must have read dozens of times; so many that it almost fell apart. I've got a feeling that Tony may have got hold of it and decided it was for him. Which in many ways it was.

I'm trying to figure out how it was I got hold of a tape of Hughes reading the sequence. I think I taped it off something. Must have played the tape dozens of times as well. Now I can't read the poems without hearing the voice of their creator, which is wonderful - but limiting in a sense.

I suppose the younger me was attracted by the dark honesty of the collection, and the savage humour. It resonates even now with the older me. And I'm struck even now by the deliberate ugliness of so much of the language. That alone seemed to me to expand the possibilities of what might be done in poetry, and still does.