Word: crows
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...CROW by Ted Hughes. 84 pages. Harper...
...chime of wineglasses . . . Crow spraddled head-down...
...Although Crow offers no letup in the agony and gore, it should win Hughes a new and wider following. In it he parcels out human history and legend in a succession of charnel-house episodes. The Garden of Eden, Oedipus, St. George, all our prototypes of beauty, heroism and love, are reduced to so much pulsing, thrashing sinew, murderously intent on survival. A harsh and one-sided view, to be sure, yet difficult to deny. The headlines are on its side. Hughes is too cunning a craftsman to try to convey his vision in headlines or rant of any kind...
...central figure in most of these fragments is Crow himself, a scraggy, scavenging creature...
...horror, Crow brings a note of jaunty irony, even whimsy, as the titles of his adventures show: Crow Tyrannosaurus, Crow Improvises, Crow's Last Stand. Crow is a sort of cosmic Kilroy. Alternately a witness, a demon and a victim, he is in on everything from the creation to the ultimate nuclear holocaust. At various times he is minced, dismembered, rendered cataleptic, but always he bobs back. In his graceless, ignoble way, he is the lowest common denominator of the universal forces that obsess Hughes...