Product Description

A collection of poems focusing on the central figure of the crow, predatory, mocking and indestructible.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #167621 in Books
• Published on: 1999-10-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 96 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Crow is black as "the wet otter's head"; Crow is "trembling featherless elbows in the nest's filth"; Crow eats, plays, kills, flies to the sun, recites theology, tests mythology, falls in love. In Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow, Ted Hughes tales a look at life from a crow's-eye view and finds it nasty and brutish. The vivid, harsh language matches the tenor of Crow's days. "When the eagle soared clear through a dawn distilling of emerald …Crow spraddled head-down in the beach-garbage, guzzling a dropped ice-cream"; "Crow thought of a wage--And it choked him, it was cut unspoiled from his dead stomach."

Former laureate Hughes dedicated this volume (first published in 1972) to the memory of Shura and Assia, his daughter and ex-lover who committed suicide, as had Hughes' wife, the poet Sylvia Plath, and it's hard to read these poems without remembering the violence of Hughes' own experience. Women are predators and victims and they die bloody deaths. In "Crow's Account of St. George" a wife and children are brutally murdered; in "Lovesong" a lover's laughs are "an assassin's attempts". Most interesting are the poems that rewrite myth--God trying to teach Crow love, Crow flying into the sun, Crow looking for language to name his world. Crow is jarringly familiar as Adam, Icarus, Oedipus and the Devil all at once in this bleak and resonant collection. - -Tamsin Todd

Customer Reviews

Scripture and Physics
This is definitely the book that divides most Hughes readers. For some it's the peak of his achievement in the mythopoeic vein - and the range of cultural reference is amazing. Hughes aplcalyptic mishmash of 'scripture and physics' plunders from theology, anthropology, science, myth and popular culture with both verve and intelligence. For others, however, the writing is criticised as sloppy, hit and miss - and certainly, if you were brought up to appreciate the 'finished', constructed poems of the 'practical criticism' era, then the shock to sensibility must've been immense.

A lot is still said about the 'blood and guts' Hughes, and 'Crow' might well be one of the more 'violent' of his books. But even here there are poems of real tenderness and concentrated awareness. If you don't believe me, check out 'Little Blood' and especially the beautiful, 'Undersong'. 'Crow' might well boil down to a book essentially about the struggle to survive in a destructive universe, but it is also haunted and undercut by possibilities that are more vulnerable, fecund and creative. This has always been the side of Hughes that prevents him from lapsing entirely into nihilism, and even in this, perhaps his darkest book, there is something to scavenge from the rubble.

Wherever you stand, though, there's nothing like it anywhere else in British poetry.

one of the top ten poetry collections in the world
To be honest - I don't know what to say. I am utterly speechless. If I could give six stars I would. These poems are among the best I have ever read in my life - and I have read quite a lot of poetry. Apparently Ted Hughes was trying to make language ugly: And that is the one thing he didn't succeed in. It is beautiful, full of vivid images and emotions. Just as the anti-hero doesn't appear evil but instead very human indeed. I can heartily recommend this book!