Ted Hughes was the first living poet I loved. The same is probably true for countless kids who went to school in the 1960s and 70s. The general rule that classroom study engenders a lifelong dislike of poetry must make an exception of Hughes. Only a teacher of chart-topping ineptitude could prevent a child from enjoying those magical early portraits of animals. I still remember the sensational shudder that ran through me at the opening of ‘The Jaguar’: ‘The apes yawn and adore their fleas in the sun.’
It was ‘adore’ that got me. Pluck or pick or squash or sift, yes, I was ready for those, but ‘adore’. It didn’t belong but it belonged. For me it was like the moment when the lozenge cracks and honey floods your tongue. Poetry could be physical.
Hughes’s talent was copious but only when deployed within a very narrow wave-band. Nature was his element. Open this book anywhere and coinages of audacious beauty soar off the page. Daffodils are ‘fresh-opened dragonflies, baby-cries from the thaw.’ Snow is ‘fallen heaven’. A boy finding a bull feels ‘the hotly-tongued mash of his cud breathing against me’.
Hughes’s sense of orchestration can conjure any mood at will. Unsettling eeriness:
Or daft, helpless pleasure:The howling of wolvesIs without world.What are they dragging up and out on theirlong leashes of sound That dissolve in the mid-air silence?
And the inexplicably ominous ‘Pike, three inches long, perfect’ …Suddenly hooligan baby starlings Rain all around me squealing.
Hughes was a nomad, an artistic chancer who convinced himself he was at home when he was stranded. The ‘Crow’ series — in which a bird posing as Everyman muses about love, life and God — is an embarrassing failure.
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