Poems from every phase of the career of a great poetThis selection of Ted Hughess poetry, made by the author himself in 1995, includes poems from every phase of his four-decade career. Here are poems from Hughess first book, The Hawk in the Rain, and its successor, Lupercal, which introduced him as a major poet; from Wodwo, Crow and Gaudete, book-length poetic sequences in which the natural world is made into a thrilling and terror-filled analogue to our human one; and from six volumes of his maturity, here arranged thematically, in which the poet is at once rural chronicler and form-breaking modern artist. The volume also includes previously uncollected poems and eight poems later incorporated into Birthday Letters, Hughess meditation in verse on his marriage to Sylvia Plath, which became an international bestseller the year after his death.About the AuthorThe masterful British poet and critic Ted Hughes (1930-98) wrote more than forty books, including, in the last decade of his life, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being; Tales from Ovid; verse adaptations of Aeschyluss Oresteia, Racines Phedre, and Euripedes Alcestis; and Birthday Letters.