Best Selling Books by Ted Hughes

All the richness of the wild is seen through the poet''s eye. Here are poems from Hawk in the Rain, Wodwo, Wolfwatching, Lupercal and River as well as from Adam and the Sacred Nine, their juxtaposition highlighting the variety of the natural world and of Hughes''s poetry about it.

The beloved story of The Iron Giant now in an abridged, beautifully illustrated picture book edition. The Iron Giant isn''t scary - he''s just very, very hungry . . . It''s not until he starts chomping on fence posts and tractors that he comes to the attention of the angry farmers - who trap him in a hole with the help of a little boy called Hogarth. He resurfaces again, upturning picnickers. So Hogarth comes up with a plan - it turns out that the scrap yard, with its metal bedframes, broken down cars and old stovetops is the perfect home.

Ffangs is different from the other vampires - he hates the sight of blood and only wants to be human. But when he leaves Vampire Island to live in London he finds everyone is terrified of him.

In "The Mermaid''s Purse, Ted Hughes explores the ocean. From starfish and seagulls to mermaids and monsters, 28 poems capture the beauty, drama, and mystery of the sea and the seashore. Here is the ghostly cormorant: "Drowned fishermen come back/As famished cormorants/With bare and freezing webby toes/Instead of boots and pants." The strange and comical flounder: "The flounder sees/Through crooked eyes./Through crooked lips/The flounder cries." And the mermaid herself: "Call her a fish, /Call her a girl./Call her the pearl/Of an oyster fresh/On its pearly dish." By turns lyrical, whimsical, and robust, "The Mermaid''s Purse showcases the distinctive voice and appreciation of the natural world that made Ted Hughes among the most respected of late-20th-century poets. Made doubly accessible by Flora McDonnell''s distinctive black-and-white art, this sea-themed collection will delight children and be welcomed by educators.

''The Calder valley, west of Halifax, was the last ditch of Elmet, the last British Celtic kingdom to fall to the Angles. For centuries it was considered a more or less uninhabitable wilderness, a notorious refuge for criminals, a hide-out for refugees. Then in the early 1800s it became the cradle for the Industrial Revolution in textiles, and the upper Calder became "the hardest-worked river in England". Throughout my lifetime, since 1930, I have watched the mills of the region and their attendant chapels die. Within the last fifteen years the end has come. They are now virtually dead, and the population of the valley and the hillsides, so rooted for so long, is changing rapidly.'' Ted Hughes, Preface to Remains of Elmet (1979) Ted Hughes''s remarkable ''pennine sequence'' celebrates the area where he spent his early childhood. It mixes social, political, religious and historical matter - a tapestry rich in the personal and poetic investment of a landscape that both creates and is inured to its people, whose moors ''Are a stage for the performance of heaven. / Any audience is incidental.'' Remains of Elmet is one of Hughes''s most personal and enduring achievements.

Ted Hughes wrote a series of stories for children from the early 1960s through until 1995 about how the world, and the creatures in it, came into being. They are collected together here in one volume for the first time. These are richly told tales of sparkling intensity about animals finding their form, and God''s struggle to understand what he has created. Meet the Polar Bear whose obsession with her snowy white fur is so great that she can only live in a landscape surrounded by her own reflection; the Whale, growing in God''s garden beside the carrots; King Leo, who began life because God was hungry for his sausages; poor Parrot''s painful defeat in the marriage-song contest at the wedding of Man and Woman; and Sparrow''s heroic battle against the bird-swallowing Black Hole. There are stories here to suit chidren from four to fourteen, whether for reading aloud or alone.

Uno de los libros más revolucionarios de la poesía del siglo XX. «Un libro considerado revolucionario de la lírica del XX, por su singularidad, complejidad y riesgo.» ABC Ted Hughes, uno de los grandes poetas ingleses de nuestro tiempo poeta laureado, famoso por su tormentosa relación con la escritora Sylvia Plath , escribió Gaudete, uno de los libros más singulares y experimentales de la poesía del siglo XX, en la cúspide de su madurez poética y volcó en la obra toda su experiencia y su capacidad de riesgo. Gaudete logra rebasar las fronteras de la poesía para convertirse en un libro indefinible, poliédrico. Es a un tiempo un guion cinematográfico, una novela y una secuencia de poemas que además experimenta una transformación estilística, desde el alucinado poema en prosa del prólogo, pasando por los poemas narrativos centrales, hasta los últimos, breves y oscuros poemas del epílogo. Una obra maestra, capital e inclasificable. La crítica ha dicho: «Una escritura de una fuerza y energía verbal difíciles de imitar. Fue un poeta prodigioso, y hoy más que nunca el genio y grandeza de sus textos resuenan con feroz actualidad. [...] Gaudete es un largo poema épico, cuya riqueza de imágenes Juan Elías Tovar ha trasvasado al castellano con sorprendente solvencia. Una de las mayores innovaciones poéticas de su época, su lenguaje es empujado más allá de los límites, sumergiéndose en un mundo enigmático y visionario.» Antonio Ortega, Babelia «Hughes será recordado por la claridad de su lenguaje, su sentido del humor y su comprensión de la condición humana.» Publishers Weekly «Ted Hughes fue un gran hombre y un gran poeta por su integridad, su sencillez y su inquebrantable verdad sobre el verdadero sentido del mundo.» Seamus Heaney «La poesía inglesa tiene un nuevo héroe. Ahora nadie podrá leer o escribir de la misma manera.» Peter Porter «Cualquier tema que pase por la pluma de Hughes conserva la misma espontaneidad de oficio que su alegría interior.» John Bayley, The Times Literary Supplement «Hughes tiene una gran imaginación espiritual: es un auténtico visionario, un primitivo moderno.» Ian Sansom, London Review of Books

In this series, a contemporary poet advocates a poet of the past or present whom they have particularly admired. By their selection of verses and by the personal and critical reactions they express, the selectors offer intriguing insight into their own work.

In this collection, Ted Hughes has written 28 songs of the sea. Here is an eye-view account of what it is to be the small fry of the ocean - a shrimp, sandflea, a mussel or a whelk. The lobster laments his form and the limpet rejoices in her steadfast stand against the stormy surf.

The late Poet Laureate presents free-verse re-creations of 24 passages from Ovid''s "Metamorphoses", including the stories of Phaeton, Actaeon, Echo and Narcissus, Procne, Midas, and Pyramus and Thisbe.

Prospectus for "Howls & whispers," by Ted Hughes, with etchings by Leonard Baskin.