Bookended by death – that of Sylvia Plath in 1963, then Assia Wevill and her daughter Shura in 1969 – Ted Hughes’s Crow, composed during the latter half of the 60s, is a collection marked by stylistic experiment and steeped in grief. Max Porter ingeniously plays with these elements in his remarkable debut, the story of a father (a Hughes scholar) and his two small boys mourning the death of their wife and mother. Into their darkened lives comes Crow, threatening to stay until he’s no longer needed by the family.
Something between novella and prose poem, the book is as slippery and shape-shifting as Crow himself, familiar from Hughes’s incarnation as antagonist and trickster, and rendered here by Porter as healer and babysitter too. The end result is a beguiling literary hybrid, highly deserving of its Guardian first book award longlisting.
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