Crow

by Ted Hughes

Paperback, 1974

Status

Checked out

Due 5-04-2023

Call number

811

Genres

All Topics

Fiction

Publication

Faber & Faber (1974), 112 pages

Description

Compendium of poems which powerfully explores the realm of primeval consciousness.

User reviews

LibraryThing member AndrewBlackman

I rarely read poetry, but I enjoyed this strange little book by Ted Hughes. It's full of dark imagery, violence and unexpected humour. The poems read like myths of the origins of the world, except that at the middle of them all is Crow, this anarchic, chaotic, ugly, violent figure, playing tricks

on God and turning creation upside-down.

I was reminded of the Anansi figure in West Indian Folk Tales, himself of course of West African origin. I suspect Hughes drew on a lot of mythological sources in these poems, many of which I am blissfully unaware of, but it didn't seem to matter - even in the poems where I wasn't sure what he was driving at, I was pleased by the rhythm of the language, somehow different in each poem but forming a coherent whole.

There's a lot more you could say about these poems - you could probably do a whole English Literature course on them - but I don't want to go that deep. I'm happy for now just to have discovered that rare thing for me, poetry that I can truly enjoy. I'll keep this on my shelf and probably re-read from time to time, if only to try to understand why this worked for me and so much other poetry doesn't.

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LibraryThing member etabu

as a lover of poetry/ whose voice and cadence had been marked/ by whitman ("my girl be at ease with me/ "for I am walt whitman, as gay and/ lusty as nature,") i was amazed and/ fitfully shocked when during my college/ cold war days i found an image in/ a crow where everything the crow owned/ was

owned by death including the/ "whole rainy, stony earth" including/ "all of space" then the voice asked/ "Who is stronger than hope?" and/ death answered again, same with/ stronger than will, love, life, and/ then the last lines in ted hughes/ 'examination at the womb-door' from/ his volume "crow"/ /"But who is stronger than Death?/
Me, evidently,/ Pass, Crow."/

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LibraryThing member shevek

Popular with angsty teenagers (including me, back in the day) but no less of a masterpiece for that. Despair undermined by nihilism, redeemed by black humour. Kind of thing.

LibraryThing member stilton

One of the very few books I was forced to read during what passed for my education that I actually liked. It led to me reading quite a lot of other poetry which I would have never touched otherwise, so I have a lot to thank it for. On returning to it more recently, however, I've found it rather

repetitive and overblown, and I find myself liking the idea of it more than the thing itself.

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LibraryThing member kenand66

Hughes most famous work, and no wonder--it is nothing less than the greatest single effort at personal mythology since T S Eliot's Waste Land.

LibraryThing member whitewavedarling

Entertaining and interesting, this collection ranges from melancholy observations to dark questions and theories, based on and around the character of Crow Hughes used for this project. As a collection, the poems hold together an odd panorama of questions and sentiments (in many cases anger or

distrust) that question life, religion, and philosophy. It's a dark book, but the poems are worthwhile, with quite a few being ones that I'll come back to many times.

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LibraryThing member Cheryl_in_CC_NV

I actually struggled through quite a bit of this. The poetry itself is amazing, passionate and beautifully metaphoric and also accessible, so I read most of it even though I struggled because it's so dark, violent, and raw. I just can't deal with so much ugly content. But I will keep looking for

more by Hughes, and I do recommend it to people less squeamish than I (which is just about everybody).

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LibraryThing member leslie.98

Pondering... but initial thoughts are that Ted Hughes was angry with God when he wrote these. Some of the poems are not just dark but disturbing; others I didn't get and some I liked so it is hard to give an overall rating.

LibraryThing member nmele

This has been in my library since its publication. Whatever one thinks of Hughes as a human being, he was one hell of a poet, and this collection, I believe, is one of his best.

LibraryThing member b.masonjudy

Wow! Crow truly kicked my ass. It's dark, mushy and blasphemous. Crow is a reoccurring character in this collection that Hughes drops into myth, both biblical and Greek, and also more current circumstances but he never fails to wretch and devour. Not for the faint of heart but well worth a read.

LibraryThing member Cail_Judy

Incredible. I read this back in 2010 and I still think about it often. Dark, winding and deep poetry.

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