Language dragged out of weather, mud, fur, blood.

Across these poems, animals snarl with human intelligence, landscapes pulse with memory, and moments of stillness feel charged with threat or revelation. In Hughes’ world; the hawk is not merely a hawk, nor the fox merely a fox. Everything arrives with a physical and mythic force that seems older than civilisation itself.

This selection spans some of Hughes’ most celebrated early and middle-period work, including The Thought-Fox, Hawk Roosting, Crow Hill, View of a Pig and The Horses. Read together, they form a kind of psychic ecology. There are poems of brutality, silence, eroticism, survival and strange transcendence. Hughes remains one of the few poets capable of making nature feel utterly alive and indifferent to human moral comfort.

Lean, muscular and often terrifyingly precise, they occupy that rare space where lyric beauty and elemental violence become inseparable.

First Faber hardback edition, 1982, with original dust jacket. Jacket remains bright and well-preserved with only minor shelf wear and light edge rubbing. Internally clean throughout with strong binding. A handsome early collected Hughes edition spanning twenty-four years of work.