Hidden Hughes.(Book Review)

Collected Poems, by Ted Hughes, edited by Paul Keegan; Faber & Faber, 2003, $99.95.

POSTHUMOUS collected poems upon a shelf can seem like a row of tombstones--a graven place fit for epitaphs that is seldom visited--each tome reiterating the Roman poet/painter Pacuvius, who at ninety composed his own epitaph:

 
   Youth, though you hurry, hither this tombstone 
      entreats you 
   Gaze upon it, and what is writ there read. 
   Here are buried the poet Pacuvi Marci's 
   Bones. I wish you not be unaware of this. 
      --Goodbye. 

The Collected Poems, which includes all the poetry published by Ted Hughes, however, refuses to play dead. The problem is not with the book as object--at over 1300 pages it is both handsome and remarkably manageable--rather it is the poems themselves that will not rest in their allotted space. The result is a book that demands our active engagement: rather than a "goodbye" it entreats us to delve ever deeper.

Between 1957, when Ted Hughes's first collection, The Hawk in the Rain, was published, and 1998, which saw the publication of Birthday Letters, Hughes published over fifty individual collections and an innumerable number of pamphlets and broadsides. As Paul Keegan states in his introduction, the present edition:

 
   takes account of a less familiar penumbra of 
   broadsides, pamphlets and limited editions, 
   published by numerous small presses and imprints 
   during the same decades in which the official 
   canon of his poetry was established with Faber 
   & Faber. Hughes's engagement with small press 
   publication extended to the co-ownership of actual 
   presses, a collaborative, even familial mode of 
   literary production--and as an alternative to the 
   protocols of trade publishing 

--one example being the broadsides printed by his son Nicholas, "a Blakean version of ownership of the means of production" notes Keegan in parenthesis.