Facts and Makings

John Bayley

  • Moortown by Ted Hughes
    Faber, 176 pp, £5.25, October 1980, ISBN 0 571 11453 9
  • Selected Poems 1955-1975 by Thom Gunn
    Faber, 131 pp, £4.50, October 1980, ISBN 0 571 11512 8
  • Collected Poems 1942-1977 by W.S. Graham
    Faber, 268 pp, £8.50, November 1980, ISBN 0 571 11416 4

Ted Hughes has always possessed in his poetry the gift that D.H. Lawrence had whenever he took up his pen: the gift of joining his ego to the visible world so that both not only energise each other but seem aspects of the same display. The first poem in this collection, ‘Rain’, seems to give the essence of what actually happens when rain falls and falls on a bare modern English farming countryside. It is an apparently casual performance that could only come from a poet steeped in his own great talent to the point of taking it for granted, as Wordsworth seems to take for granted the exposition of his verse paragraphs, or Browning a prolonged monologue. Hughes is remorseless in his eye for what is really happening outside in nature at such a time. The cows

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