Crow

I have just recieved in the post my own copy of Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow, by Ted Hughes and it is brilliant. Read it, read it, read it. My copy cost me only 1p from Amazon and arrived today, when I ordered it the day before yesterday. I love this book, but I can’t really describe it. It’s a collection of poems mainly about a character called Crow, with odd creation myths (you may have read How The Whale Became, also by Hughes, which is a collection of creation myths for children – this is in a similar vein but darker, weirder, and containing lines like this:

Crow laughed.

He bit the Worm, God’s only son,

Into two writhing halves.

 

He stuffed into man the tail half 

With the wounded end hanging out.

 

He stuffed the head half headfirst into woman

And it crept in deeper and up

To peer out through her eyes

Calling its tail-half to join up quickly, quickly,

Because O it was painful.

This is from a poem called ‘A Childish Prank’. It’s a fairly good example of the tone of the whole book: savage, angry and twisted. And it just blows me away. I can’t really describe it or do it justice, but anyway, there you have it.

 

Meanwhile I’ve just put up another of my favourite of Hughes’s poems, Lovepet.