Description:

From the astonishing debut Hawk in the Rain (1957) to Birthday Letters (1998), Ted Hughes was one of postwar literature’s truly prodigious poets. This remarkable volume gathers all of his work, from his earliest poems (published only in journals) through the ground-breaking volumes Crow (1970), Gaudete(1977), and Tales from Ovid (1997). It includes poems Hughes composed for fine-press printers, poems he wrote as England’s Poet Laureate, and those children’s poems that he meant for adults as well. This omnium-gatherum of Hughes’s poetry is animated throughout by a voice that, as Seamus Heaney remarked, was simply “longer and deeper and rougher” than those of his contemporaries.