Nature read in tooth and claw

TED HUGHES: NEW SELECTED POEMS 1957-1994 Faber £14.99/£7.99

THERE is something disconcertingly concerted about Ted Hughes' writing career as it is now laid out before us. With his 300-page New Selected Poems 1957-1994 following on the heels of last year's huge collection of occasional prose, Winter Pollen, and his massive Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, Hughes now confronts us with something of the sheer bulk and presence of a contemporary poetic Titan.

Hughes' art might be described as a "convulsive re-sacralisation" of poetry, English poetry in particular, performed in the context of a post- Christian, secular and biologistic world view. His New Selected Poems 1957-1994 is crammed with the harvest of the 15 or so collections he has published since The Hawk in the Rain announced his scarifying arrival on the poetry scene nearly 40 years ago. It not only weighs in with the bulk of a complete oeuvre but grips you with the kind of compelling vision, the broad reach and humming note of a life's work. It would be easy to mock Hughes' obvious stylistic idiosyncrasies - in sequences like Crow and Cave Birds the poet has the impossible project of forging sacred archaic texts from non-existent ancient cultures in authentically violent modern idioms - or else to satirise the combination of fishing-lore and Shamanic New Age doctrine that drives so many poems (poetry and mumbo-jumbo are a bit close for comfort in all this).

Nevertheless despite the flailing unevenness of his prolific and horrific muse, the first poem "The Thought Fox" and the last "The Dove" are unmistakably part of a single, massive, raucous and obstinately heterodox visionary project that (for all its indebtedness to Blake, Hopkins, Lawrence and Dickinson) is awesomely unlike anything else in the language.

I grew up with the slim two-headed Hughes-Gunn Selected Poems, which mainly drew on the arrestingly clenched early nature studies like "Hawk Roosting" and "Pike". Since then there have been two more - the second of which, Selected Poems 1957-81, took the story on via the violent, playful mythological narratives of Crow, Cave Birds and Gaudete and ended with extracts from the disparate topographical and legendary sequences of Moortown, "Prometheus on his Crag" and "Adam and the Sacred Nino". There was a sense of disappointment in these later poems, of Hughes treading water in mid- career, as if he'd written himself into the narrow ground he elected as his own.

The new book utterly dispels this. It swells the number of poems from earlier books (restoring the wonderful apologia for his own art, "To Paint a Water Lily" from his second book, for example, doubling the number of scratch lyrics from Crow to 34, and almost doubling the selections from Cave Birds and the magnificent Season Songs for children). It also gathers uncollected poems, such as the early, ex-pansive "Recklings" and a later, recklessly exposed personal sequence about his parents and the haunting legacy of Sylvia Plath.

More importantly, it collects a rich crop of lyrics from his most recent collections, Flowers and Insects, What is Truth?, River and Moonwatching, which show Hughes developing new reaches of his art, exploring with larger- breathed daring than ever before his entranced vision of the natural world in all its dizzying specificity. As usual, Hughes is alert to the predatory dimension of nature - he describes a tern as "a blood-dipped harpoon", "honeysuckle hanging her fangs" - but he has also developed an astonishing eroticised vision of it: "the silky body" of a foxglove is a "soft oven/ for loaves of pollen", a grasshopper is a "belly of amorous life, pulsing signals", a river "stirs her love potion - ooze of balsam/ Thickened with fish-mucus and algae."

Hughes' characteristic subject-matter is ritual, natural and English ("Pike" evokes a pond's "Stilled legendary depth;/ It was as deep as England"). Yet Hughes' clouds are "full of surgery and collision" and he brings to the familiar visual repertoire of English nature poetry the technical violence of a Van Gogh or Francis Bacon. His poems are jagged, untidy, stressful in every sense. Nature is a world of "delicacy and horror" like the pike's, dominated by first and last things, birth and death, and where a dying salmon finds "this chamber of horrors is also home".

The other thread that weaves across his work and vision of England is war, especially the legacy of the Great War he calls "our national ghost". Unlike the First World War poets who opposed pre-war nature to the horrors of war, Hughes reads nature as a battle-field; for his ghost-crabs, "our cluttered countries are empty battleground", his thistles appear "Stiff with weapons fighting over the old ground", and an old salmon is dressed in Death's "clownish regimentals, her badges and decorations".

I'm not convinced by many of Hughes's poems about people (even the new ones about Plath) or society, or the monarchy (only one of his laureate poems finds its way in here). Hughes is a psalmist of the natural world, a poet of huge delicacy and vulnerability as well as creative violence. After you've read this Protean book through, as after an exhibition of Van Gogh, the natural world changes shape.