An episode from 3/15/24: Tonight, I read eleven poems from Ted Hughes’s 1979 collection, Remains of Elmet. His books Crow, Moortown Diary, Remains of Elmet, and River contain his best poetry, and they are models for any artist in how handle nature, animal life, myth, and autobiography in their work. The poems that I read from Remains of Elmet are:
- Light Falls through Itself
- Crown Point Pensioners
- “Six years into her posthumous life”
- These Grasses of Light
- Walls
- Heather
- Remains of Elmet
- Where the Millstone of Sky
- The Ancient Briton Lay under His Rock
- Heptonstall
- Cock Crows (the audio of Hughes reading the poem comes from here)
This is a revision and complete re-recording of an episode first posted in April of 2021, which included only seven poems. I’ve used the opportunity to also read from Jonathan Bates’s biography of Hughes, Hughes’s later notes to the book, as well as handful of letters he wrote about the collection.
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Email me at humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com.
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