After [his] youthful, somewhat amateur-carpenter exercises in stanza-form, [Hughes] has abandoned this in his later work for a narrative mode that is largely his own invention—characterised by a disdain for rhyme, lines of ad hoc length, a jerky movement from incident to incident, etc.

At times Hughes seems to be going for a primeval effect, as though his verses were really translations of fragments lucky to survive from some remote and rather butch culture. So, in Cave Birds, his latest sequence, we get:

         Big terror descends.
 
         A drumming glare, a flickering face of flames
 
         Something separates into a signal,
         Plaintive, a filament of incandescence,
 
         As it were a hair …

This is more mannered than anything we find in Crow. I once attended a reading of Hughes's where he gave us a number of songs from that work and accompanied each with a narrative preamble—the story that...