A Ted Hughes Bestiary: Poems

“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 chronologicall...