Most Popular Books by Ted Hughes

When Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun''s ground-breaking anthology After Ovid (also Faber) was published in 1995, Hughes''s three contributions to the collective effort were nominated by most critics as outstanding. He had shown that rare translator''s gift for providing not just an accurate account of the original, but one so thoroughly imbued with his own qualities that it was as if Latin and English poet were somehow the same person. Tales from Ovid, which went on to win the Whitbread Prize for Poetry, continued the project of recreation with 24 passages, including the stories of Phaeton, Actaeon, Echo and Narcissus, Procne, Midas and Pyramus and Thisbe. In them, Hughes''s supreme narrative and poetic skills combine to produce a book that stands, alongside his Crow and Gaudete, as an inspired addition to the myth-making of our time.

The fearsome iron giant becomes a hero when he challenges a huge space monster.

When an iron giant topples over a cliff his scattered parts get up and try to search for each other.

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.

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.

All the poems of a great 20th-century poet.

A collection of stories by the Poet Laureate of England includes among others the fable "O''Kelly''s Angel," about a man who captures and cages an angel, and "The Wound," about an episode in World War II.

Ted Hughes described letter-writing as "excellent training for conversation with the world." These nearly 300 letters—selected from several thousand—show him in all his aspects: poet, husband and father, lover of the natural world, proud Englishman, and a man for whom literature was a way of being fully alive to experience. There are letters dealing with Hughes''s work on classic books, from the early breakthrough Lupercal to the late, revelatory Birthday Letters. There are letters discussing, with notable frankness, his marriages to Sylvia Plath and then to Assia Wevill. After marrying Carol Orchard, in 1970, Hughes ran a farm in Dorset for several years, and there are letters touching on his interest in astrology, his strong and original views of Shakespeare, and his passion for farming, fishing, and the environment in general. Letters to Seamus Heaney and Philip Larkin situate Hughes among his peers as never before. Letters of Ted Hughes reveals the author as a prose writer of great vigor and subtlety. It deepens our understanding of—and our admiration for—this great twentieth-century poet.

Alcestis is the story of a king, Admetus, who is able to escape death because his wife, Alcestis, has volunteered to die in his place. Ted Hughes''s version goes beyond translation to an inspired rethinking of the story in terms of his own vision of human suffering. Although he started working on this piece in 1993, he did not finish until a few months before his death in 1998. It is the culmination of an extraordinarily productive period of work, which saw the publication of Tales from Ovid (1997), Birthday Letters (1998) and The Oresteia (1999).

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

CHILDREN''S BOOKS/YOUNG ADULT

Love poems from a husband to a wife who committed suicide. The writer is poet laureate to Queen Elizabeth II. His wife, Sylvie Plath, who was also a poet, gassed herself in 1963 after writing, "Dying is an art, like everything else." The couple are still the subject of controversy in England, some claiming he drove her to it, others that she was an impossible wife.

A collection of poems focusing on the central figure of the crow, predatory, mocking and indestructible.