Flowers and Insects, Some Birds and a Pair of Spiders

The sixteen poems gathered in Ted Hughes’ ‘Flowers and Insects, Some Birds and a Pair of Spiders’ brim and bristle with the life Hughes generates from the absolute attention he commits to whatever it is he is looking at. His knack for finding a language to animate its subject, without a trace of sentiment or nostalgia, singles out Hughes as one of the truly great poet-interpreters of the natural world. This edition gives full justice to the subtlety of the original watercolour illustrations, produced by Hughes’s long-term collaborator and friend, the American artist, Leonard Baskin.