SOURCE: A review of Gaudete, in World Literature Today, Vol. 52, No. 3, Summer, 1978, p. 467.

[In the following review, Holkeboer lauds Hughes's Gaudete.]

Praise for Hughes has been grudging for some reason. Called the finest poet of his generation (the competition scarcely threatens this equivocal honor), he is at the same time patronized as a flashy wordsmith, master of the consonantal dazzle, like Fry or Dylan Thomas, the rhetoric meretriciously masking and emptiness beneath, a certain cruel sentimentality. Hughes deserves better.

Gaudete, his first volume of poetry since Crow (1971), is an extraordinary book, strange, visionary and deeply moving. Its protagonist is an Anglican minister by the name of Lumb (the name suggests a functionary—dumb, numb, lumbering) abducted from his sleepy parish by spirits who fashion a new Lumb, an exact replica, out of an oak log. The new Lumb ministers to his parish in a Dionysian way, seducing its...