Content area
Full Text
Ted Hughes. New Selected Poems: 1957-1994. London. Faber & Faber. 1995. xiii + 332 pages. L7.99/$12.95. ISBN 0-571-17378-0.
It is beginning to look as if Ted Hughes wants to make a habit of selecting his poems. His first such selection, simply and appropriately called Selected Poet, appeared as long ago as 1968 and gathered up poems from the first decade or so of his individually published volumes. The second, New Selected Poems, claimed merely to move the process up by a few years to 1981 but proleptically contained several poems from River, a volume which did not appear until 1989. Now his third and latest selection reprints just about all the poems contained in the first two collections as well as continuing to add poems from subsequent individual volumes. Here for the first time, however, Hughes also includes poems which have either not been published before or have not been garnered as vet into individual volumes. For both of these groups he establishes a new, decade-by-decade category labeled "Uncollected"; and, possibly in order to mitigate the habituality of his by now habitual act of selection, he also once in a while changes the order in which previously chosen poems formerly appeared, or even assigns some to the "Uncollected" realm despite their prior appearance elsewhere, as in the case of "You Hated Spain." Toward the end of his latest selection he also deviates in a few places from his hitherto habitual procedure of reprinting poems according to their dates of first publication.
All this...