Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

     It is appropriate and desirable that a volume should be produced soon after the death of a major writer, but only if the quality of its contents is worthy of the occasion. By a kind of tragic good fortune this is the case here, since Nick Gammage, as the Editor’s Note explains, was already in the process of collecting contributions for a volume to celebrate Hughes’s seventieth birthday when news of his death arrived. This means the varied contents of this book – well produced by Faber with a number of photographs and other illustrations, including six fine Crows from Leonard Baskin – betray no disabling appearance of hurried composition, though – as in any such compilation – they vary a good deal in quality.

     The book is structured in three sections. The first deals with specific works by Hughes, from some student poems discussed by Karl Miller to Birthday Letters. Of these contributions, I particularly enjoyed Blake Morrison’s piece, ‘Wodwo’, which neatly combines criticism and reminiscence, as he argues for the recognition of the volume as “the book in which Hughes found his mature voice”, and also notes how his own earlier reading of Hughes had been too much in thrall to Alvarez’s emphasis, in The New Poetry, on “romantic risk and agony” to be aware of the “humour, stoicism, loving detail” in the poetry. Marina Warner achieves a similar blend in ‘Hoopoe’, noting the fierceness of Hughes’s writing in ‘Amulet’ as it had appealed to her young son, and praising the rendering of the story of Tereus and Philomela in the Tales from Ovid. She draws attention to what is often ignored in criticism’s emphasis on Hughes’s force and power: “the final stanza of his ‘Tereus’ reveals the enthralling quietness of his voice when he wanted to draw out the shape of the myth and modulate the screams and bellows of its mayhem to a mood of redemptive elegy”, ending the poem in quiet lines that “don’t appear in Ovid, except as ghosts flitting between them”. I also liked Raymond Briggs’s account of ‘Tractor’, Seamus Heaney’s positive reading of ‘Littleblood’, and Michael Hofmann’s of ‘Remembering Teheran’, one of the uncollected (and I suspect still little known) poems in the 1995 New Selected Poems. In a poem not characteristic of Hughes in its subject matter, Hofmann convincingly finds “a continual openness to impressions, to terror, to strangeness, to awe”. Medbh McGuckian’s ‘After Moortown’ bravely proffers a poem of that title that she wrote in the early 1980s for Ted Hughes but has never previously published, and makes an illuminating remark about “the cautious mixture of prejudice, scepticism, reserve and respect with which we women poets have split our loyalty between Plath and her gifted survivor”. Hughes would, I think, have appreciated the spirit of the translation as ‘The Ebony Adonis’ of Nuala ní Dhomhnaill’s ‘An Prionsa Dubh’ with which McGuckian concludes, wittily describing it as “a lightish-hearted Bell Jar accepting total responsibility for the sins of the daughter”. By contrast with these discussions, I found a number of the others too brief to be illuminating – my New Critical belief in the possibility of unloading every seam of its ore could not be achieved in the couple of pages which contributors like Andrew Motion and Roger McGough allowed themselves. One wonders how far the editor controlled the length, as he must have controlled the number, of the contributions. This section also includes brief tributes and reminiscences from Peter Brook, John Gielgud, Irene Worth, Lavinia Greenlaw and Tim Supple about Hughes’s involvement with theatre. These help to round out the picture of his achievement, especially in conjunction with Donya Feuer’s account of Hughes’s encouragement of her project, undertaken in Sweden in the light of her reading of his A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse, of turning his selections from Shakespeare into a continuous dramatic soliloquy.

     The second section consists of poems dedicated to Hughes by an impressive range of contemporary poets. Some of the poems are, as it were, free-standing; others refer directly to Hughes. Of these I particularly enjoyed Charles Causley’s, based on the experience of reading and talking about the poet in what sounds like a primary school, Gillian Clarke’s ‘The Fisherman’, a meditation on poetry arising from listening to Hughes reading, W.S. Merwin’s semi-formal elegy ‘A Planh for the Death of Ted Hughes’, and Charles Tomlinson’s ‘For T.H.’, which beautifully combines memory and meditation on art:

For what we want is that exchange of melodies,
The stimulation of tunes that answer on another
In the salt and sway of the sea’s own weather
As they did that day we faced into the wind there...

Of the free-standing poems, I was most impressed by Medbh McGuckian’s powerful ‘Shannon’s Recovery’ and William Scammell’s evocative ‘Goa’, while Les Murray is at his most polemical as he uses the occasion to attack intolerance in ‘A Deployment of Fashion’.

     The final section consists of thirteen largely thematic essays. Peter Stothard’s ‘Election ‘97 and Ted Hughes’s Final Reading’ seemed to me too journalistic to be worth including, but otherwise the range is wide and interesting. Among the best are Miroslav Holub on ‘Hughes in Czech’ and Christopher Reid, all too briefly, on ‘Ted Hughes as Reader’. Michael Morpurgo’s ‘Ted Hughes: Children’s Champion’ reminds us of a significant aspect of Hughes referred to by several other contributors, and informed me of Hughes’s consistent support for the Farms for City Children organisation. The longest contribution comes from Hughes’s long-time champion and not uncritical admirer, Keith Sagar. Entitled ‘A Poet and Critic’, it covers several aspects of Hughes’s work, including Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. Sagar’s account of his correspondence with Hughes during the writing of that extraordinary work shows both Hughes’s striking independence of mind and his readiness to learn from others whom he found “on [his] wavelength”.

     What that wavelength was, is of course for future criticism to determine; it may not be that for which some of the more doctrinaire contributors to this book would wish to claim him. But it seems to me that The Epic Poise goes a good way towards justifying the claim to creative authority made in its title – though it may be worth noting that the designated embodiment of the poise in the poem from which the quotation is taken is an October salmon:

     All this, too, is stitched into the torn richness,
     The epic poise
     That holds him so steady in his wounds, so loyal to his doom, so patient
     In the machinery of heaven.

Hughes would have grimly enjoyed the identification.