Collected Poems By Ted Hughes (edited by Paul Keegan)

The king of the beasts

It's somewhat disarming to pick up a collection of poems by Ted Hughes that begins with a corny yarn about a gun-slinging cowboy, written in slapstick couplets: "Carson McReared the terrible killer,/ The man with a hide like an armadillo." ("Wild West")

But this piece of juvenilia is the opening poem in a very big book that tells a very long story. Two stories, in fact, one being the narrative of Hughes's intriguing publishing career, the other the development of his poetic ideas. The story that this volume does not tell, mercifully, is the biography, and prior to the release in January of a film which casts Gwyneth Paltrow as Sylvia and some bloke you've never heard of as Ted, it is a blessed relief to think only of the work.

Ted Hughes's relationship with Faber & Faber began in 1957 with the appearance of The Hawk in the Rain and was to span his entire career. As well as his mainstream books, Hughes found an outlet through a succession of small-press or private publications. Throughout the 1970s, for example, much of Hughes's work made its first appearance courtesy of The Rainbow Press, an imprint run by his sister, Olwyn.

It was intended that the coloured spines of these carefully produced books should eventually represent the colour spectrum of the press's title. There was to be no such pot of gold at the end of the bookshelf, but all the poems from those uncommon and sometimes legendary editions have found their way into this huge suitcase of a book.

Collated from such widely scattered sources, these Collected Poems represents a meticulous piece of scholarship and research, yet the unobtrusive presence of its editor, Paul Keegan, has allowed for a highly readable compendium in which over 1000 pages of poetry is allowed to speak for itself. For the first time, landmark volumes such as Wodwo and Crow can be viewed in chronological contrast with less well-known collections such as Recklings from 1966 and Howls and Whispers, published the year of his death, along with individual poems published in newspapers, magazines and journals. The inclusion of these rarities gives an impression of the poet testing the water, his mind ticking over in the space between major projects.

Take the poem "Fanaticism", which appeared in the 1990 publication Capriccio. The print run was limited to 50 copies. The poem is typical of Hughes, with references to mythology, mortality and fertility. It goes on to detail a kind of morbid striptease through which the dark drama of Assia Weavill's suicide becomes increasingly apparent. The tone of voice is detached, "As the drowned leave their clothes folded." Yet by the final stanza, a shift in emphasis has occurred:

"After forty I'll end it," you laughed

(You were serious) as you folded your future

into your empty clothes. Which Oxfam took.

Suddenly Hughes is not only an observer and commentator on the scene, he is a character within it. He doesn't mention himself, doesn't use the word "I", but there he is, in the charity shop. He is involved. Implicated. It points the way towards the breathtaking confessional style of Birthday Letters, which would appear eight years later.

That said, there are no time-bombs or land-mines here, planted to go off after the poet's death. All the poems have seen the light of day before, even if only through a chink in the curtains. It could be that more poetry lies buried deep in the archive of Hughes's papers in the vaults of Emory University, and as Keegan points out, this is not a "Complete Poems".

It is, however, a serious anorak job, incorporating a selection of comments made by Hughes himself over the years, a succession of notes which double as a bibliography, and a painstaking survey of the cross-referencing that went on between the poems and all their variant forms.

This is, in fact, as definitive a document as we might desire or need, and like all publications of its type, provides the opportunity of assessing in bold terms the legacy left by its author. Where does Hughes stand in the formidable line up of the good and the great? What is his contribution?

To begin, reading this book from cover to cover brings home the extent to which Hughes was a poet of nature. Not a tree-hugger or a swooning figure among the blooms of spring, but a writer whose determination to get to grips with the forces of life and death brought him into contact with the very question - the one and only question - of existence. At one end stands eternal obliteration, at the other, the occasional flashes of ecstasy which provoke in us the will to survive.

Hughes's work is a kind of negotiated dialogue between these two extremes, often centred on a beast or a bird. At a point in time where the natural world can never again be taken for granted, Hughes's Collected Poems is a kind of literary Noah's Ark where endangered species are preserved and protected in the form of language. Seen in that light, Hughes is the supreme conservationist.

The other aspect of Hughes's bequest is literary. In the second half of the 20th century, along with Larkin and Heaney, Hughes helped to keep poetry within earshot of the general reader. The best poets are communicators - they need to make themselves heard - and on this level, Hughes was, and continues to be, fantastically successful. People understand his poems. People remember them - even children.

Those who require depth of thinking from their poets are not disappointed by Hughes because the complexity of his subject matter represents something of a bottomless abyss, but even for the non-specialist reader there is enough on the surface to dazzle and delight.

Modernists and theorists are always seeking to lure this ancient art form away from its roots and strengths towards some intellectually fortified bunker on the outskirts of obscurity. But Ted Hughes, unfashionably at times, yet determinedly and in the end victoriously, did his bit to anchor contemporary poetry in a place closer to home, where poetry can still work its magic, and where most of us live.

Simon Armitage's most recent collection , 'The Universal Home Doctor', is published by Faber & Faber