At Ease

Ted Hughes's Tales from Ovid and Birthday Letters might appear to be very different in their concerns yet reading through his final collection I'm struck by one similarity. Quite a number of the Letters involve narratives of events involving Ted and Sylvia and the strikingly relaxed and easy manner of the story-telling reminds me of the character of the narratives in the translated Tales. It's as if TH has reached such a level of confidence that he doesn't try in any obvious sense to write 'poetically' for whole stretches of the poems. Yet even in the apparently blandest lines the language is working hard.

When reading The 59th Bear the other day I found myself marvelling at the perfection of the most casual details, the effortless mastery of throwaway lines. One example: We roamed, some at home in the marvellous abundance. / Eagles were laid on too. Just when you might think marvellous abundance is a bit of a lazy cliché, the idea that the birds are just being laid on for some kind of public performance makes you realise the work that every word is doing.

So much of what has been written about the poems in Birthday Letters seems to revolve around TH's sense of SP being doomed and the sheer intensity of their relationship. But I find much of their power lies in the evocation of the memory of the ordinary stuff of life that went on regardless of the fact that each happened to be a genius.

Mind you, I must acknowledge the frequency of lines that catch the breath and momentarily stun. Towards the end of Grand Canyon, the poem that follows The 59th Bear, I stopped at the line, Nothing is left. I never went back and you are dead. I had to overcome something suspiciously close to a sob before continuing. Yet, again, the line is so simple and unadorned.