Crow is Hughes’s most powerful work. He described its language as ‘super-ugly’, and it gives you the sense of standing close to something very dangerous, a furnace door, or some deafening piece of machinery. It was written in the aftermath of tragedy. Its dedicatees, ‘Assia and Shura’, were Hughes’s mistress Assia Wevill and their two-year-old daughter, whom she killed when she killed herself. But its outcry is not just personal. A document of the Cold War, it anticipates nuclear holocaust. A post-Christian testimony, it confronts man’s universal loneliness. Its scenery is both cosmic and corporal. Worlds end, stars fume away into blackness, and the human body bursts into a butcher’s shop of horrors.
What saves it from mere despair is Crow. Obscene, indestructible, screaming for blood, brutally funny, he is Hughes’s own creation, not drawn from any previous myth.
Ted Hughes - Crow: From the Life and Songs of Crow (1970) [fragment]
uit:
Pure pleasure : a guide to the twentieth century’s most enjoyable books - John Carey
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