"Ted Hughes was a great man and a great poet because of his wholeness and his simplicity and his unfaltering truth to his own sense of the world." --Seamus Heaney
Originally, the medieval bestiary, or book of animals, set out to establish safe distinctions--between them and us--but Ted Hughes's poetry works always in a contrary direction: showing what man and beast have in common, the reservoir from which we all draw. In A Ted Hughes Bestiary, Alice Oswald's selection is arranged chronologically, with an eye to different books and styles, but equally to those poems that embody...
"Ted Hughes was a great man and a great poet because of his wholeness and his simplicity and his unfaltering truth to his own sense of the world." ...