Rocks and guts and bullocks

Lloyd Evans

COLLECTED POETRY by Ted Hughes Faber, £40, pp. 1332, ISBN 0571217192 Ted Hughes was the first living poet I loved. The same is probably true for countless kids who went to school in the 1960s and 70s. The general rule that classroom study engenders a lifelong dislike of poetry must make an exception of Hughes. Only a teacher of chart-topping ineptitude could prevent a child from enjoying those magical early portraits of animals. I still remember the sensational shudder that ran through me at the opening of The Jaguar': The apes yawn and adore their fleas in the sun.'

It was 'adore' that got me. Pluck or pick or squash or sift, yes, I was ready for those, but 'adore'. It didn't belong but it belonged. For me it was like the moment when the lozenge cracks and honey floods your tongue. Poetry could be physical.

Hughes's talent was copious but only when deployed within a very narrow waveband. Nature was his element. Open this book anywhere and coinages of audacious beauty soar off the page. Daffodils are 'fresh-opened dragonflies, baby-cries from the thaw.' Snow is 'fallen heaven'. A boy finding a bull feels 'the hotly-tongued mash of his cud breathing against me'.

Hughes's sense of orchestration can conjure any mood at will, Unsettling eeriness:

The howling of wolves Is without world.

What are they dragging up and out on their long leashes of sound That dissolve in the mid-air silence?

Or daft, helpless pleasure:

Suddenly hooligan baby starlings Rain all around me squealing.

And the inexplicably ominous 'Pike, three inches long, perfect' ...

Hughes was a nomad, an artistic chancer who convinced himself he was at home when he was stranded. The 'Crow' series —in which a bird posing as Everyman muses about love, life and God — is an embarrassing failure. I lost touch with Hughes from adolescence onward, preferring Larkin with his subtler and more urbane sensibility and his easier feel for human experience. Hughes was all rocks and guts and bullocks. He wasn't much of a narrator either. His gift is for the rugged stand-alone utterance. Many of his poems proceed by gentle lurches — they have the stark brilliance of still photographs but not the satisfying current of moving pictures. Often they lack shape, escalation or climax.

When he was asked to become laureate I think everyone sensed it wasn't quite right. Larkin declined, properly, and the office ought to have passed with Betjeman. To accept should, I feel, be taken as evidence that one is not suited to the job. Perhaps Hughes embraced the task in a careless or mischievous spirit. It's quite possible he was ribbing his patrons when he supplied verse of almost Aeschylean density. Like this: And of the exultant larvae in the Barle's shrunk trench, their filaments ablur like propellers, under the churned ceiling of light, and of the Lyn's twin gorges, clearing their throats, deepening their voices, beginning to hear each other....

That's Prince Harry's christening poem, as I'm sure everyone knows. I expect he's in the outback right now with his fellow jackaroos, teasing out the allusions over a glass of amontillado and a mythological dictionary.

The Birthday Letters are the last of Hughes's grand experiments. Most are patchy, some appalling, a few exceptional. It sold by the truckload, but I imagine many were bought as presents, probably delighting the giver more than the recipient.

A picture emerges of a relationship that veered between farce, melodrama and pretension. 'We only did what poetry told us to do' is their collective mission statement. The Muse's instructions involved acquiring a Chesterfield sofa of Prussian blue velvet, entertaining each other with `sostenuto renderings of Chaucer' and using a ouija board on summer evenings to interrogate spirits about their favourite lines from Shakespeare. One of the undead wittily answered: Never, never, never, never, never.

Bad omens abound. Plath complained bitterly of feeling trapped in England. The clammy weather and filth-encrusted buildings deepened her depression. They holi

dayed frequently. On a fishing trip in America they were caught by the tide and nearly drowned. Camping in a forest one night they were woken by a rogue grizzly which ripped their car to pieces. The following morning they learned it had already killed a man. In Spain, Plath succumbed to a fever and was convinced she was about to die. In Paris she refused to give money to 'a dark stub gypsy woman'.

Like a pistol her finger

Came up to your face, all her momentum Icicled into a pointer: Vous

Creverez bientot.

At their best, the Letters are as harrowing and moving as anything Hughes wrote. He had finally found a way of realising a human response to human affairs. 'By night I lie awake in my body,' he wrote in 'Life After Death'. I doubt if anyone who has lost a spouse could read that poem without reaching for comfort.