Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow by

Ted Hughes

Free download audio book.

Original Title: Crow

ISBN: 0571176550
ISBN13: 9780571176557
Autor: Ted Hughes
Rating: 4.2 of 5 stars (3969) counts
Original Format: Hardcover, 89 pages
Download Format: PDF, RTF, ePub, CHM, MP3.
Published: February 4th 1996 / by Faber and Faber / (first published 1970)
Language: English
Genre(s):
Poetry- 491 users
Classics- 19 users
Literature >20th Century- 10 users
Description:

Crow was Ted Hughes's fourth book of poems for adults and a pivotal moment in his writing
career. In it, he found both a structure and a persona that gave his vision a new power and
coherence. A. Alvarez wrote in the Observer, 'Each fresh encounter with despair becomes the
occasion for a separate, almost funny, story in which natural forces and creatures, mythic figures,
even parts of the body, act out their special roles, each endowed with its own irrepressible life.
With Crow, Hughes joins the select band of survivor-poets whose work is adequate to the
destructive reality we inhabit.'

About Author:

Edward James Hughes was an English poet and children's writer, known as Ted Hughes. His
most characteristic verse is without sentimentality, emphasizing the cunning and savagery of
animal life in harsh, sometimes disjunctive lines.
The dialect of Hughes's native West Riding area of Yorkshire set the tone of his verse. At
Pembroke College, Cambridge, he found folklore and anthropology of particular interest, a
concern that was reflected in a number of his poems. In 1956 he married the American poet . The
couple made a visit to the United States in 1957, the year that his first volume of verse, , was
published. Other works soon followed.
Hughes stopped writing poetry almost completely for nearly three years following Plath's suicide in
1963 (the couple had separated earlier), but thereafter he published prolifically, often in
collaboration with photographers and illustrators, as in Under the North Star (1981). He wrote
many volumes for children, including Remains of Elmet (1979), in which he recalled the world of
his childhood. From 1965 he was co-editor of the magazine Modern Poetry in Translation in
London. Some of Hughes's essays on subjects of literary and cultural criticism were published as
Winter Pollen (1994). After decades of silence on the subject of his marriage to Plath, Hughes
addressed it in the poems of (1998). In 1984 he was appointed Britain's poet laureate.
Ted Hughes was the father of and the brother of .

Other Editions:

- Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow (Paperback)

- Crow: From The Life And Songs Of The Crow (Paperback)

- Crow (Paperback)

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

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

Books By Author:
- Birthday Letters

- The Iron Man

- Collected Poems

- The Hawk in the Rain

 - Letters of Ted Hughes

Books In The Series:

Related Books On Our Site:

- Kid

- High Windows

- Death of a Naturalist
 - Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis

- The War Poems

- Feminine Gospels: Poems

- Life Studies
 - Geography III

- Collected Poems

- 77 Dream Songs

- The Branch Will Not Break

 - The Light the Dead See: Selected Poems

- Behind My Eyes [With CD]

- The Man With Night Sweats

Rewiews:
Aug 18, 2013
Paul Bryant
Rated it: it was amazing
Shelves: poetry
Timeline
Suicide of Ted Hughess wife Sylvia Plath, 1963
Suicide of Ted Hughes current partner Assia Wevill, 1969
Publication of Crow, 1970
This is the context for the screeching brutality, ugliness and relentless howling nastiness of Crow
and its picture of humanity as the scraping of nails on the blackboard of creation and
consciousness as worse than anthrax.
Crow is really severe stuff.
Crow is horror poetry.
When Crow cried his mothers ear
Scorched to a stump.
In the poems, Crow is many things s
Timeline
Suicide of Ted Hughess wife Sylvia Plath, 1963
Suicide of Ted Hughes current partner Assia Wevill, 1969
Publication of Crow, 1970
This is the context for the screeching brutality, ugliness and relentless howling nastiness of Crow
and its picture of humanity as the scraping of nails on the blackboard of creation and
consciousness as worse than anthrax.
Crow is really severe stuff.
Crow is horror poetry.
When Crow cried his mothers ear
Scorched to a stump.
In the poems, Crow is many things sometimes he appears to be Hughes himself; sometimes the
well known trickster, Loki or someone similar, cavorting, disgusted by everything, meddling,
cocking things up, himself a scrawny reeking speck of gristle and greasy black feathers with a vast
appetite and completely unkillable; and sometimes hes a kind of reverse Christ (with black
feathers).
I love Ted Hughes animal poetry, which includes plenty of carnage but taken as a whole is a
tremendous celebration, the nature channel fused with Thomas Traherne. But Crow has no
compassion, no pity. He's done with that.
Crows Account of the Battle
The cartridges were banging off, as planned, The fingers were keeping things going
According to excitement and orders.
The unhurt eyes were full of deadliness.
The bullets pursued their courses
Through clods of stone, earth, and skin, Through intestines pocket-books, brains, hair, teeth
According to Universal laws
And mouths cried "Mamma"
From sudden traps of calculus, Theorems wrenched men in two, Shock-severed eyes watched
blood
Squandering as from a drain-pipe
Into the blanks between the stars.
Faces slammed down into clay
As for the making of a life-mask
Knew that even on the sun's surface
They could not be learning more or more to the point
Reality was giving it's lesson, Its mishmash of scripture and physics,
With here, brains in hands, for example, And there, legs in a treetop.
There was no escape except into death.
And still it went on--it outlasted
Many prayers, many a proved watch
Many bodies in excellent trim, Till the explosives ran out
And sheer weariness supervened
And what was left looked round at what was left.
Crow cannot die, his suffering which is only briefly drowned out by his laughter cant die and it
seems has no purpose. Theres no comfort to be had.
Some individual poems are quite incomprehensible (Crowego, Robins Song, Crows Undersong
sometimes the language is pushed too far and melts down into surrealism) but it all fits into this
terrifying epic bleak panorama, so I dont get the unpleasant complete door-slamming
incomprehensibility from Crow, even at its most difficult, that I did from Wallace Stevens, and had
to give him the elbow, beautiful language and blue guitars and all. Wallace Stevens was too clever
for me, like Shoenberg or something. Ted Hughes is more like Captain Beefheart. This is not to
compare Stevens and Hughes, because why should you, its just that I read both recently.
But I could fly with this disgusting bird, because after another day watching the news or another
brilliantly eviscerating movie about just how fucked things actually are, in the poor parts, in the rich
parts, and in the soft parts between, Crow is the appropriate response, Crow is what I wish to say.
Sometimes you read a book or hear a song and you think: this is mine. It might not be very nice
but your blood recognises it immediately : this is mine.
Crow straggled, limply bedraggled his remnant.
He was his own leftover, the spat-out scrag
He was what his brain could make nothing of.

Sometimes weeping, sometimes cawing with laughter, sometimes both, Crow flaps through all our
skies.
"Well," said Crow, "What first?"
God, exhausted with Creation, snored.
"Which way?" said Crow, "Which way first?"
God's shoulder was the mountain on which Crow sat.
"Come," said Crow, "Let's discuss the situation."
God lay, agape, a great carcass.
Crow tore off a mouthful and swallowed.

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