Most Popular Books by Ted Hughes

The past contemporary poet gives an account in 88 poems in letter form of hisromance and the life spent with Sylvia Plath.

A collection of works by a contemporary English poet selected from twelve books of poetry written over a 25-year period.

When Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun''s ground-breaking anthology After Ovid (also Faber) was published in 1995, Hughes''s three contributions to the collective effort were nominated by most critics as outstanding. He had shown that rare translator''s gift for providing not just an accurate account of the original, but one so thoroughly imbued with his own qualities that it was as if Latin and English poetwere somehow the same person. Tales from Ovid, which went on to win the Whitbread Prize for Poetry, continued the project of recreation with 24 passages, including the stories of Phaeton, Actaeon, Echo and Narcissus, Procne, Midas and Pyramus and Thisbe. In them, Hughes''s supreme narrative and poetic skills combine to produce a book that stands, alongside his Crow and Gaudete, as an inspired addition to the myth-making of our time.

This volume replaced Ted Hughes''s Selected Poems 1957-1981. It contains a larger selection from the same period, to which are added poems from more recent books, uncollected poems from each decade of Ted Hughes''s writing life, and some new work. Another notable feature is the inclusion of poems from his books for younger readers, What is the Truth? and Season Songs.

The fearsome iron giant becomes a hero when he challenges a huge space monster.

A clanking iron giant topples from a cliff and lies smashed on the rocks below. Then his various parts begin to stir and reach out for one another. The Iron Man is ready to walk again, and he is very hungry.

A collection of Ted Hughes'' poetry from previously published works, including "The Hawk in the Rain," "Lupercal," "Cave Birds," and "Season Songs."

Alcestis is the tale of a queen sacrificing herself so her husband may live. Ted Hughes'' classical translation was his final work, completed just before he died. As with his other works, it goes beyond its remit and is an inspired retelling of the play from his own perspective on human suffering.

This version of Frank Wedekind''s extraordinary play Spring Awakening was specially commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The themes it addresses and the sheer energy of the writing make this masterpiece of German symbolism startlingly relevant today. With its scenes of pubescent angst, sexual outspokenness, rape and homosexuality, the play still, more than one hundred years after it was first staged, has the power to shock. Ted Hughes''s rendition lends the dialogue a particularly modern terseness and bite, drawing out all the erotic energy of the original.

Ted Hughes described letter-writing as "excellent training for conversation with the world." These nearly 300 letters—selected from several thousand—show him in all his aspects: poet, husband and father, lover of the natural world, proud Englishman, and a man for whom literature was a way of being fully alive to experience. There are letters dealing with Hughes''s work on classic books, from the early breakthrough Lupercal to the late, revelatory Birthday Letters. There are letters discussing, with notable frankness, his marriages to Sylvia Plath and then to Assia Wevill. After marrying Carol Orchard, in 1970, Hughes ran a farm in Dorset for several years, and there are letters touching on his interest in astrology, his strong and original views of Shakespeare, and his passion for farming, fishing, and the environment in general. Letters to Seamus Heaney and Philip Larkin situate Hughes among his peers as never before. Letters of Ted Hughes reveals the author as a prose writer of great vigor and subtlety. It deepens our understanding of—and our admiration for—this great twentieth-century poet.

Wolfwatching, Ted Hughes''s fourteenth collection of poetry, contains several characteristic poems, in which nature is presented with striking exactitude, unclouded by sentiment. But Hughes breaks new ground with a number of intimate and unforgettable poems that memorialize members of his family as they were in his youth, in the years following the First World War.

All the poems of a great 20th-century poet.

A collection of 24 poems grouped to represent the four seasons.

All the richness of the wild is seen through the poet''s eye. Here are poems from Hawk in the Rain, Wodwo, Wolfwatching, Lupercal and River as well as from Adam and the Sacred Nine, their juxtaposition highlighting the variety of the natural world and of Hughes''s poetry about it.

Shows by explanation and example how modern poets such as Dickinson, Lawrence, Welty, Roethke, Plath, and Larkin captured pictures with words.

One of a series of titles first published by Faber between 1930 and 1990, and in a style and format planned with a view to the appearance of the volumes on the bookshelf. This was the Poet Laureate''s fourth book of poems for adults, and represented a significant moment in his writing career.

-A selection of animal poems from the seminal British poet, Ted Hughes---

CHILDREN''S BOOKS/YOUNG ADULT

The authors second collection which prints some of his most revered work including Pike, Hawk Roosting and November.

Originally published in 1979, Moortown Diary is the updated version of Ted Hughes''s acclaimed Devon farming sequence, written over a period of several years during which he was spending almost every day outside, either gardening or farming. The introduction and notes (added in 1989) sketch in the background from which these remarkable poems emerged as an improvised verse journal, sparely edited, coalescing spontaneously on the page. '' Moortown Diary keeps its eye firmly on the creatures behind the language. It''s written in the style of Hughes''s play translations: very swift and bright and urgent and speakable...Hughes strips away the protective layers - the soundproofed ears, the double-glazed eyes - that prevent us making contact with anything outside ourselves. Right now, I can''t think of anything more important than that kind of poem. Because we''re not just here to think about literature. We''re here to try to wake up.'' Alice Oswald, The Guardian ''It grips your heart, and your intestines, like a vice from the first page. He makes language as physical as a bruise, and in these poems beauty and tenderness blend with violence.'' John Carey, Sunday Times ''The Moortown sequence includes some of Hughes''s finest poems...They are like no other poems I have read, with a degree of intensity, sanity and grace that he has never equalled.'' Anthony Thwaite, Times Literary Supplement

This collection of eleven evocative, accessible and funny stories for children of 5+ tells how a particular animal came to be as it is now. The Whale grew up in God''s vegetable patch but was banished to sea when he became too large and crushed all His carrots; the Polar Bear was lured to the North Pole by the other animals who were jealous that she always won the annual beauty contest; the Hare has asked the moon to marry him but can never stretch his ears high enough to hear her reply; the Bee must sip honey all day long to sweeten the bitter demon that runs through his veins . . . each story is a delight for reading alone or aloud.

This critical work on Shakespeare attempts to show his complete works - dramatic and poetic - as a single, tightly-integrated, evolving organism. Identifying Shakespeare''s use in the poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, of the two most significant religious myths of the archaic world, Hughes argues that these myths later provided Shakespeare with templates for the construction of every play from All''s Well that Ends Well to The Tempest. He also argues that this development, in turn, represented his poetic exploration of conflicts within the living myth of the English Reformation.

Illustrations and rhyming text portray a hobby gone awry, as Bert''s collection of exotic pets seems on the verge of breaking into a quarrel, and perhaps a rumpus, as well.

The achievement of Ted Hughes as a poet is inseparable from his achievement as a translator of poetry and poetic drama. Throughout a long and intensely productive career, Hughes was continuously engaged in acts of translation, for the page and for the stage, starting with his role in the establishment of the annual Poetry International in London and the magazine Modern Poetry in Translation, which he co-founded with Daniel Weissbort in 1965, and which notably brought to attention poets such as the Israeli Yehuda Amichai, the Hungarian Janos Pilinszky and the Yugoslav Vasko Popa. The present volume, edited by Weissbort, surveys this aspect of Hughes''s canon for the first time, offering a broad selection from his numerous translations, together with hitherto unpublished material (versions of Paul Eluard, or of Yves Bonnefoy), and excerpts from essays and letters. Strongly rooted in a native tradition, Hughes was nevertheless indebted to literary cultures other than his own, and his work far transcends national boundaries. The present volume selects from his versions from a wide variety of ancient texts - the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Aeschylus, Euripides, Ovid, Seneca, Racine - and equally from a range of twentieth century European poets and dramatists.

Illustrated poems about an otter, a dragonfly, a cow, a robin, and many other creatures of the land, sea, and air.

This is a new version of the Racine play by Hughes. His reputation as a dramatist is firmly established following the success of previous adaptations of Oedipus and Spring Awakening. The book will tie-in with the production starring Diana Rigg.

Poems about the animals of northern regions.