'Gaudete' is a narrative poem telling the story of an Anglican clergyman abducted by spirits into the other world.

A clanking iron giant topples from a cliff and lies smashed on the rocks below. Then his various parts begin to stir and reach out for one another. The Iron Man is ready to walk again, and he is very hungry.

Originally published in 1957, Hawk in the Rain was the first collection of poems by Ted Hughes. The book won the New York Poetry Center First Publication Award, for which the judges were W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Marianne Moore; it also won the Somerset Maugham Award. Indeed, Hawk in the Rain was acclaimed by every reviewer from A. Alvarez to Edwin Muir, and in its pages we can still see the promising brilliance of one of the most important English-speaking poets of the modern age.

Crow was Ted Hughes's fourth book of poems for adults and a pivotal moment in his writing career. In it, he found both a structure and a persona that gave his vision a new power and coherence. A. Alvarez wrote in the Observer, 'Each fresh encounter with despair becomes the occasion for a separate, almost funny, story in which natural forces and creatures, mythic figures, even parts of the body, act out their special roles, each endowed with its own irrepressible life. With Crow, Hughes joins the select band of survivor-poets whose work is adequate to the destructive reality we inhabit'.

A collection of twenty-eight poems grouped to represent the four seasons.

This volume contains a large selection of poems from 1957 to 1994, including uncollected poems from each decade of Ted Hughes's writing life, and some new work. Another notable feature is the inclusion of poems from his books for younger readers, 'What is the Truth?' and 'Season Songs'.

Hughes's three contributions to the anthology After Ovid an accurate account of the original so thoroughly imbued with his own qualities that it was as if Latin and English poet were somehow the same person. This volume continues the project, with 24 passages including the stories of Phaeton, Actaon, Echo and Narcissus, Procne and Midas.

With just two exceptions, these 88 poems, in the form of a narrative, are addressed to Sylvia Plath, the American poet to whom Hughes was married. They were written over a period of more than 25 years, the first a few years after her suicide in 1963. Intimate and candid, they cover the whole period of their relationship, from the first meeting to the aftermath of Plath's death, but are largely concerned with the psychological drama that led to the writing of her finest poems and to her death.

This volume contains six plays suitable for performance by children. Four were published under the title The Coming of the Kings and Other Plays, and the other two are Orpheus, previously only published in America, and The Pig Organ published for the first time.

Bringing together the poems Ted Hughes wrote for children, this collection is arranged by volume, beginning with those for reading aloud to the very young, progressing to the poems in "Under the North Star" and "What is the Truth?" and ending with "Season Songs", which Hughes remarked was written 'within hearing' of children.