There’s something apt about celebrating the anniversary of Ted Hughes’s death with the republication of Lupercal, which includes such Hughes classics as “Pike” and “Hawk Roosting”. Today, more than ever, Hughes – who died 25 years ago this Sunday – has become a voice for our times, taking his readers into a closer intimacy with nature.
In a blink, it’s 1960: nature’s unclouded by climate change, and it’s an age of innocence in which JFK is about to become president; another American, TS Eliot, is a director at Faber & Faber; and Samuel Beckett has just published Happy Days. Hughes is in the fourth year of his marriage, and his beloved wife will open this airy, slim volume of some 40 poems (notably “A Woman Unconscious” and “An Otter”) to devour its carefree dedication, “To Sylvia”.
