New Releases by Ted Hughes

Blood Wedding is based upon a newspaper fragment which told of a family vendetta and a bride who ran away with the son of the enemy family. Lorca uses the story to investigate subjects which fascinated him such as desire, repression and ritual.

This version of Frank Wedekind''s extraordinary play Spring Awakening was specially commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The themes it addresses and the sheer energy of the writing make this masterpiece of German symbolism startlingly relevant today. With its scenes of pubescent angst, sexual outspokenness, rape and homosexuality, the play still, more than one hundred years after it was first staged, has the power to shock. Ted Hughes''s rendition lends the dialogue a particularly modern terseness and bite, drawing out all the erotic energy of the original.

A collection of prose pieces on literary matters and on writers. Hughes also expresses concerns about education, the environment and education in general.

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.

Wolfwatching was the fourteenth collection published by Ted Hughes (1930-98), England''s former Poet Laureate. In it, we encounter several poems that feature his typically striking yet somber exactitude, a style of perception and depiction always unclouded by sentiment. Other poems find Hughes returning to the Yorkshire landscape of his childhood, recounting the tragic effects of World War I, or revisiting the dire plight of that region''s coal miners and textile workers. Wolfwatching is an unflinching book about the struggles of this world, struggles both physical and spiritual, both in and out of nature.

In 1984 Ted Hughes was made Poet Laureate. Since then, he has fulfilled his duties by writing a number of poems celebrating important royal occasions. These are major works, calling on the Laureate''s full powers and embodying a complete vision of royalty and nationhood. Rain-Charm for the Duchy collects these poems for the first time. It also contains a section of notes, throwing light on the context and genesis of each poem.

Brings together three short pieces written in homage to T.S. Eliot. The three pieces were prompted, in turn, by the unveiling of a plaque, by a reading of The Waste Land in a London theatre, and by a centenary dinner.

CHILDREN''S BOOKS/YOUNG ADULT

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.

Explores the strange and wonderful moon-world. The terrain is fantastic, its creatures both intriguing and grotesque, but all is touched by the Poet Laureate''s moon magic.

The Early Books of Yehuda Amichai collects for the first time in a single volume the three works -- Songs of Jerusalem and Myself, Poems and Time -- that established Amichai as Israel''s greatest contemporary poet and one of the major poets of our time.

Sylvia Plath is one of the defining voices in twentieth-century poetry. This classic selection of her work, made by her former husband Ted Hughes, provides the perfect introduction to this most influential of poets. The poems are taken from Sylvia Plath''s four collections Ariel, The Colossus, Crossing the Water and Winter Trees, and include many of her most celebrated works, such as ''Daddy'', ''Lady Lazarus'' and ''Wuthering Heights''.

A collection of works by a contemporary English poet selected from twelve books of poetry written over a 25-year period.

A sequence of poems and drawings which capture the essence of the lonely, mysterious creatures who struggle to survive under the North Star.

A collection of 24 poems grouped to represent the four seasons.