Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow - Hardcover

Hughes, Ted

4.07

4,450 ratings by Goodreads

9780571047635: Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0571047637 ISBN 13: 9780571047635

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 1973

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Crow holds a uniquely important place in Hughes oeuvre. It heralds the ambitious second phase of his work, lasting roughly from the late sixties to the late seventies, when he turned from direct engagement with the natural world to unified mythical narratives and sequences. It was his most controversial work: a stylistic experiment which abandoned many of the attractive features of his earlier work, and an ideological challenge to both Christianity and humanism. Hughes wrote Crow, mostly between 1966 and 1969, after a barren period following the death of Sylvia Plath. He looked back on the years of work on Crow as a time of imaginative freedom and creative energy, which he felt that he never subsequently recovered. He described Crow as his masterpiece. This creative period was brought to an end by another tragedy: the deaths of Assia Wevill and her daughter Shura in March 1969.

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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

Book Description:

Crow by Ted Hughes is a work of mythological power from one of the most important English poets of the twentieth century.

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