POSTHUMOUS collected poems upon a shelf can seem like a row of tombstones--a graven place fit for epitaphs that is seldom visited--each tome reiterating the Roman poet/painter Pacuvius, who at ninety composed his own epitaph:

Youth, though you hurry, hither this tombstone
entreats you
Gaze upon it, and what is writ there read.
Here are buried the poet Pacuvi Marci's
Bones. I wish you not be unaware of this.
--Goodbye.

The Collected Poems, which includes all the poetry published by Ted Hughes, however, refuses to play dead. The problem is not with the book as object--at over 1300 pages it is both handsome and remarkably manageable--rather it is the poems themselves that will not rest in their allotted space. The result is a book that demands our active engagement: rather than a "goodbye" it entreats us to delve ever deeper.

Between 1957, when Ted Hughes's first collection, The Hawk in the Rain, was published, and 1998, which saw the publication of Birthday Letters, Hughes published over fifty individual collections and an innumerable number of pamphlets and broadsides. As Paul Keegan states in his introduction, the present edition:

takes account of a less familiar penumbra of
broadsides, pamphlets and limited editions,
published by numerous small presses and imprints
during the same decades in which the official
canon of his poetry was established with Faber
& Faber. Hughes's engagement with small press
publication extended to the co-ownership of actual
presses, a collaborative, even familial mode of
literary production--and as an alternative to the
protocols of trade publishing

--one example being the broadsides printed by his son Nicholas, "a Blakean version of ownership of the means of production" notes Keegan in parenthesis.

Given that individual poems and sequences of poems were re-arranged and altered through each subsequent publication, Paul Keegan's editorial labour has been all but simple. Many of his decisions will facilitate our perception of Hughes's dynamic range, whilst a few editorial choices might frustrate some readers. Essential to the volume are the 130-odd pages of appendixes, notes and indexes; praise here must go to Keegan for managing to keep such matters within a manageable and succinct compass.

The arrangement of the poems in the present Collected Poems follows a chronological order with each main collection, starting with The Hawk in the Rain, followed by a section of uncollected poems that were only ever published in periodicals or as a limited edition broadside. Wherever the contents pages indicate, with a "from", that a selection has been made from a collection of poems, one will need to consult the endnotes to find where some of the poems have been moved to in the present volume.

The omission of poems for children from the present volume, although some of those written "within hearing" of children such as the Season Songs collection are included, is perhaps unfortunate. Faber & Faber, however, are planning a volume of Hughes's complete poems for children in late 2005.

Although as a rule individual poems are written to stand as independent entities, what brings us to a deeper involvement with a poet is the orchestration of a sequence of poems. Crow, undeniably Hughes's best-known creation, is brought together with the material that preceded and followed the expanded Faber edition of 1972. For those who wish to trace the movements of this singular mythical alter ego of creation, an appendix provides the content list of the original publication and the endnotes list the various places of publications, variants, and locate those Crow poems that appear outside the "Crow" section.

Hughes at times changed titles of individual poems in subsequent publications, and the Collected Poems provides an appendix of variant titles. Unfortunately the appendix does not provide variant first lines of poems that have no title, which causes some difficulties.

IF AT TIMES the intimacy of holding a small volume that contains a single entity within its covers is frustrated by the weight of a Collected Poems that holds the published production of a lifetime, with Ted Hughes the advantages outweigh the drawbacks. The picture that emerges is far more diversified than the Faber canon of his poetry would indicate. Apart from the occasional poems that were only ever published in periodicals, the body of work published in limited editions often reveals a more personal and private voice (at times including some of the less successful creations, such as Recklings, the runt of a litter, of 1967), and those poems that were simply too fragile for the public jaws of criticism.

Howls & Whispers, Hughes's last collection, is a case in point. Published a few months before his death in 1998 in a limited edition of 110 copies, it is intimately related to Birthday Letters. The eleven poems that make up Howls & Whispers show Hughes at his most acerbic and gentle at the same time--and unguarded throughout---oscillating between the memories of the first meeting described in "Paris 1954", where Sylvia Plath is first glimpsed as:

The scream
Already looking for him, as he sits there,
And that will certainly find him, coming closer
Now in the likeness of a girl

and the omens that permeate the memories which preceded and followed her tragic fate.

Following the release of Birthday Letters in February 1998, Hughes wrote to his lifelong friend and illustrator Leonard Baskin that he had gone into hiding before its release, saying, "I just don't want the agitation and over-reaction," adding that he felt "utterly disconnected" at the success of the book and was certain that the "35-year-old crocodiles" who had condemned Hughes for Plath's suicide, would not

mutate from their crocodile form as predators. So I
expect there'll be some muddy flurries. When all
that's passed, I think the book will stay readable--simple, naive and unguarded as it is.

Collected Poems is a volume that invites readers to toss its pages back and forth; to follow not the life of a poet, but the metamorphosis that each poem undergoes as it shifts from one gathering to another. A final word must go to Paul Keegan's fine editorial presence, which remains hidden throughout and is exemplified in the epithet that opens his brief preface: "The page is printed.

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