Difficulties of a Bridegroom - Hardcover

Hughes, Ted

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 031214587X ISBN 13: 9780312145873

Publisher: Picador, 1996

Synopsis

This first collection of short fiction by England's Poet Laureate ranges in setting from Yorkshire to Africa, and addresses themes that have preoccupied Ted Hughes throughout his career.

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Reviews

This collection of taut, intense stories, described by England's Poet Laureate Hughes (Crow; Winter Pollen) in his foreword as a kind of "accompaniment" to his poems, displays his characteristic violent streak and animal-fixated animism. With themes of hunters, prey and nature's hidden power, the loose story sequence begins with "Deadfall," a yarn in which a ghost may be either an old woman or a trapped fox, and culminates in "The Head," a gory, magic-real tale of hunters on a prodigious slaughter spree in the jungle. Even when Hughes revisits the ordinary world of his native Yorkshire in the three most neatly constructed stories ("Sunday," "The Rain Horse" and "The Harvesting"), man and animal clash to the point of trading places. Sometimes, Hughes delivers only mood set pieces, such as the waiting game between a secret admirer and his doppelganger at his beloved's threshold in "The Suitor" and the blizzard-blinded limbo of "Snow." Though Hughes is not a natural raconteur, these stories (one of which has never been published before; two others not previously published here; the remainder out of print since 1967) show how effectively he can concentrate his talent for forceful images into compelling narratives.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A first collection of fairy tales and fables from Britain's Poet Laureate (Winter Pollen, 1995, etc.), who seems somewhat less than steady on his feet when it comes to prose. Like most poets, Hughes has a keen ear for the music of language, and a strong, almost visual sense of image, and he makes good use of these talents in his stories, all of which seem, in the final analysis, to become evocations of mood rather than narratives. Thus, in ``O'Kelly's Angel,'' we are witnesses to the political furor that erupts across Europe when a caged angel is put on display in Yorkshire, and in ``The Deadfall,'' we are told of a boy's quest to find the ghosts who appear to his mother. The perspective throughout is often that of a child: ``Sunday,'' for example, shows how a dead rat provides a boy with his first inklings of mortality, just as ``Rain Horse'' describes a somewhat older boy's conquest of such fear as it's expressed in connection with a farmhorse escaped from its paddock. While Hughes manages to convey moods and the textures of feeling with great skill, he invests these moods with very little history and almost no storyline for the reader to grasp or remember. Those familiar with the sad history of Hughes's marriage to Sylvia Plath, for example, will be able to decode the symbolism of ``The Head,'' but most may be baffled by its opacity. Similarly, the war narrative at the heart of ``The Wound'' is made somewhat more interesting through an awareness of its genesis in the actual experience of the author, but not enough so to make up for its obscurity of purpose and general lack of action. Good news for fans of Hughes (and Plath) only; less resonant for others. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 031214587X
• ISBN 13: 9780312145873
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 159