Christmas Reading (courtesy of my parents)




















The Selected Letters of Ted Hughes, (ed. Christopher Reid)

This is an incredible and exhausting book. Seamus Heaney commented in The Irish Times on the psychic pressures that the poems of Birthday Letters bring to bear on the reader. Reading these letters is to revisit those pressures.

Hughes never shied away from exposure, 'that outer-edge nostalgia / the good feeling,' as he describes it in 'Black Coat' from Birthday Letters. That volume presents him as the loser of a folktale wager, left clasping a jewel-box from which the jewel has already been lost. In these pages, he wonders whether a lifetime is enough to ever fully recover from the personal tragedies which afflicted him, principally the suicide of his first wife Sylvia Plath, and the replica suicide of his second wife Assia Weevil alongside their young daughter Shura. We follow him to a more stable third marriage and purchasing of a farm, his struggle to keep his children out of the public glare, his public role as a guardian of poetry as well as personal sadnesses such as his brother's absence due to relocation to Australia.

Hughes is never less than fascinating. He explains his belief that poetry is a way of dealing with pain that cannot be dealt with any other way, and therefore provides solace to the writer and the reader. Animals represent his spiritual health - drifting on distant arcs or scorched and bleeding when he is in a state of crisis or exhaustion. His practices for stimulating creative productivity read virtually like a primer - he recites a mantra (sadly undisclosed) before writing, reads Shakespeare aloud for two hours first thing each morning, sleeps whenever the inclination takes him, dabbles with astrology and the occult and memorises verse. His descriptions of plays, poets, poems and fishing are fantastically vivid.


Margrave of the Marshes, John Peel

This is a considerably more gentle book:

Intolerable were the demands made by study monitors. A study might consist of three or four citizens, with the senior being the monitor and the junior the doul. A boy called Cox was my study monitor for a year and amongst the tasks he assigned me on a regular basis was that of boot-polishing his bicycle tyres. When he adjudged them clean and shiny enough, he would take his bike for a short spin in the mud before telling me to start again. Strong though the temptation might have been, telling him to go fuck himself would have resulted in serious punishment. However, I'm currently operating under no such constraints, so: Go fuck yourself, Cox.

The first releases [on John's Dandelion records label] were Bridget's single 'To B Without a Hitch' and her album Ask Me No Questions, which John produced. During one mammoth all-night session which I [Sheila Ravenscroft, John's wife] attended, he came up with the idea of putting layers of birdsong and church bells on the title track, weaving together sounds from the BBC library until it felt just right. After the album's release in August 1969, John used to get enquiries about the birds: people wanted to know where he had recorded them, since there were species singing together that had never been known to gather in the same habitat.

Sadly John never raised the funds necessary to finance the 101 Sharons, his pet Dandelion
project for which he planned to gather together 101 women named Sharon, lock them in a studio and refuse to release them until they'd recorded an album.

[John frequently characterised his relationship with Radio 1 producer John Walters] as being like that of a man and his dog, but with each plainly believing the other to be the dog. Walters came up with his own analogy, likening John to Eeyore from A.A.Milne's Winnie the Pooh stories. 'Everybody's having honey while he's in some damp corner of a field, alone and ignored, with nothing but thistles,' noted Walters. 'If I call to remind him that he has a programme on Bank Holiday, it's: "Everybody gets a holiday but me." If I say he's got the day off to make way for some sort of Radio 1 special, it's: "They're trying to get rid of me." Either way it's thistles and I suspect he finds them rather reassuring.'