SOURCE: A review of New Selected Poems, 1957–1994, in New Statesman & Society, Vol. 8, No. 348, April 14, 1995, pp. 45-6.

[In the following review, Roberts discusses the suffering and death in Hughes's poetry from New Selected Poems, 1957–1994.]

Woody Allen once said that nature was one big restaurant. Push that one step further—one big morgue, one big abattoir—and we approach Hughes-land, a country loud with the shrieks of beasts caught in sprung traps. Of men too, of course, since Hughes has never been shy of projecting the suffering endemic in the human condition, as he sees it, onto those souls that go clad in fur, feather and leaves.

This new volume of selected poems, a larger version of the compilation he produced 15 years ago, offers a broad sweep through a lifetime's dedication to poetry and reveals, as it gathers momentum, a huntsman's loving preoccupation with the quest and quarry: death. Inevitable...