Moon-Bells and Other Poems [published in the United States as Moon-Whales and Other Poems] is, in a very real sense, a young person's guide to Ted Hughes. It does not aspire to the density and subtle orchestration of his recent Season Songs, but neither is it … a parcel of left-overs. At the festive level, closest to the nursery, there are several examples of Hughes's verbal juggling and wizardry of scansion … and the comic-strip invention, which is there as an element in much of his most complex work, has a field-day in some of the moon-fantasies which give the book its title and are deployed at intervals throughout it, providing a delightfully airy and bizarre linkage between the more substantial pieces….

Only Ted Hughes could have given us that Beano WHOP placed just there, or the delightful/groan-making rhyme of electronic and chronic. It is a productive complicity between...