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First published in 1983, River celebrates fluvial landscapes, their creatures and their regenerative powers.
Inspired by Hughes’s love of fishing and by his environmental activism, the poems are a deftly and passionately
attentive chronicle of change over the course of the seasons. West Country rivers predominate (‘The West Dart’
and ‘Torridge’), but other poems imagine or recall Japanese rivers or Celtic rivers, and ‘The Gulkana’ explores
an ancient Alaskan watercourse. At its core the sequence rehearses, in various settings, from winter to winter,
the life-cycle of the salmon.
All this, too, is stitched into the torn richness,
The epic poise
That holds him so steady in his wounds, so loyal to his doom,
so patient
In the machinery of heaven.
from ‘October Salmon’
Ted Hughes (1930-1998) was born in Yorkshire. His first book, The Hawk in the Rain, was published in 1957 by Faber & Faber and was followed by many volumes of poetry and prose for adults and children. He received the Whitbread Book of the Year for two consecutive years for his last published collections of poetry, Tales from Ovid and…
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