Collected Animal Poems (Volumes 1 to 4) by Ted Hughes. First edition (1995). First impression of this set of four volumes in a slipcase. Book 1 is flat signed by both author Ted Hughes and Illustrator Chris Riddell to half title page.There are some very minor marking to the slipcase. The books are fine and unmarked. Please see pictures.
About Ted Hughes
So, Edward James Hughes was an English poet and children’s writer, known as Ted Hughes. His most characteristic verse is without sentimentality, emphasizing the cunning and savagery of animal life in harsh, sometimes disjunctive lines. The dialect of Hughes’s native West Riding area of Yorkshire set the tone of his verse. At Pembroke College, Cambridge, he found folklore and anthropology of particular interest, a concern that was reflected in a number of his poems. In 1956 he married the American poet Sylvia Plath. The couple made a visit to the United States in 1957, the year that his first volume of verse, The Hawk in the Rain , was published. Other works soon followed. Hughes stopped writing poetry almost completely for almost three years following Plath’s suicide in 1963 (the couple had separated earlier). But thereafter he published prolifically, often in collaboration with photographers and illustrators. For example, as in Under the North Star (1981). He wrote many volumes for children, including Remains of Elmet (1979). In which he recalled the world of his childhood. From 1965 he was co-editor of the magazine Modern Poetry in Translation in London. Furthermore, some of Hughes’s essays on subjects of literary and cultural criticism were published as Winter Pollen (1994). After decades of silence on the subject of his marriage to Plath, Hughes addressed it in the poems of Birthday Letters (1998). Also, in 1984 he was appointed Britain’s poet laureate.
