Moortown Diary
About this book
Originally published in 1979,
Moortown Diary is the updated version of Ted Hughes's acclaimed Devon farming sequence, written over a period of several years during which he was spending almost every day outside, either gardening or farming. The introduction and notes (added in 1989) sketch in the background from which these remarkable poems emerged as an improvised verse journal, sparely edited, coalescing spontaneously on the page.
'
Moortown Diary keeps its eye firmly on the creatures behind the language. It's written in the style of Hughes's play translations: very swift and bright and urgent and speakable...Hughes strips away the protective layers - the soundproofed ears, the double-glazed eyes - that prevent us making contact with anything outside ourselves. Right now, I can't think of anything more important than that kind of poem. Because we're not just here to think about literature. We're here to try to wake up.' Alice Oswald,
The Guardian
'It grips your heart, and your intestines, like a vice from the first page. He makes language as physical as a bruise, and in these poems beauty and tenderness blend with violence.' John Carey,
Sunday Times
'The Moortown sequence includes some of Hughes's finest poems...They are like no other poems I have read, with a degree of intensity, sanity and grace that he has never equalled.' Anthony Thwaite,
Times Literary Supplement
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Table of Contents
- Dedication
- Preface
- Rain
- Dehorning
- Poor birds
- Feeding out-wintering cattle at twilight
- Foxhunt
- New Year exhilaration
- Struggle
- Bringing in new couples
- Snow smoking as the fields boil
- Tractor
- Roe-deer
- Couples under cover
- Surprise
- Last night
- Ravens
- February 17th
- March morning unlike others
- Turning out
- She has come to pass
- Birth of Rainbow
- Orf
- Happy calf
- Coming down through Somerset
- Little red twin
- Teaching a dumb calf
- Last load
- While she chews sideways
- Sheep
- The day he died
- A monument
- The formal auctioneer
- A memory
- Now you have to push
- Hands
- Notes
- About the Author
- Copyright
