“What’s the first thing you think of?” Ted Hughes asked himself in the title of one of his poems. To which the answer was: “My brother bent at his airplane, in his attic.” And the second? “The Heights Road. My brother launching a glider / Below where an airplane crashed above the golf-links.” The brother was Gerald Hughes, who has died aged 95.
Ted Hughes is nearly always regarded as a great poet of nature, the only poet laureate since Wordsworth to animate the spirits of bird and beast, river and moor. He is also remembered as a poet of love and grief, especially in Birthday Letters (1998), his bestselling elegies for his first wife, the poet and writer Sylvia Plath. It is less often recognised that he was a great poet of family. His most under-rated volume is the magnificent Remains of Elmet, first published in 1979, and expanded with additional family poems in 1994. It was here that he wrote most memorably of his childhood in the Calder Valley, of his father forever scarred by the first world war, his Wordsworth-loving mother’s love and her psychic powers, and his older brother, Gerald, who took him from the village of Mytholmroyd to the Yorkshire moors above, where they explored, camped, fished and hunted.
Related: Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life by Jonathan Bate review – sex and self-deception
Continue reading...
