Amy Lingafelter: A Book I Love

Specifically, this copy of this book.

I had read most of it before, in libraries and at other people’s houses. And I knew a lot about it when I got it.  I was at Mercer Street Books in NYC with amazing former contributor Tanya Larkin on October 27, 2007. We both saw it at the same time, but she let me buy it.  She's good to me. We talked about the poems a lot.  

It’s the first US edition from 1971, and the pages are worn in the best way.  You can see it’s a great artifact for someone who likes books as artifacts.    I’ve always loved prices on old books, too, and thinking about the cost of milk and meat at the time. $2.95 for all the things inside this book in 1971. After I read it straight through, the $2.95 stuck out at me most for some reason.

It’s a beautiful book.

It’s really not for everybody.  It’s full of death and animals and animalistic behavior and God and really specific names of body parts and modern machinery and Oedipus and "a ceremonial Japanese decapitator" and stabbing and battles and wombs.  It's a lot.

 

It can be read in one sitting. 

I see it in a lot of other places. I imagine Markus Zusak read it before he wrote his excellent The Book Thief.

I’d be interested to talk to someone who came to it blindly.  I can’t describe reading it without some pretty extensive background knowledge of Hughes’ life.  I think this made the book more valuable to me, but how the poems exist without the context of him, I don’t know.

I don’t know how the poems exist on their own at all, really.  I know my favorites are: Crow’s First Lesson, A Grin, In Laughter, Crow Frowns, Crow Blacker Than Ever…

The agony did not diminish

Man could not be man nor God God.

The agony

Grew.

Crow

Grinned

Crying: “This is my Creation,”

Flying the black flag of himself.

That line.  I want to fly the black flag of myself.

It’s not a book I want to leave the house with or return to very often.  It’s kind of like the Schindler’s List of violent poetry books.  That movie got to me, intensely, but it’s not something I really want to watch again to pass the time.  It is not a pass-the-time book. 

Examination at the Womb-Door, also a favorite.  The act of owning in that poem inspires me. Death owns your still-working lungs, your utility coat of muscles, your questionable brains, but who is stronger than death?  Someone about to be born.  For the moment. 

That might be the best picture to paint of it.  It is essentially a book that describes the act of living (waking up and breathing every day) as "owning a utility coat of muscles."    Thank you for letting me buy it that day, TL.

 

 

Comments

[The Best American Poetry]

I remember when it came out -- to great fanfare -- in England, where I was studying at Cambridge. DL

[Daniel Westover]

Thanks for this post, Amy. I love this book, too. It is certainly Hughes's masterwork, though it came at a great cost, birthed by the tragic deaths of Sylvia Plath, Assia Wevill, and the 4 year-old Shura. In my eyes, it is the defining collection of the 1970s, not just for what it is, but also for how influential it was on British poetry in that decade. I always share this quote from Rand Brandes with my students when I teach Hughes:

“If our deepest grief could speak, it would speak Crow…No one who truly engages Crow can forget it; it becomes a terrible touchstone in one’s memory field…[It] is clearly Hughes’s ‘dark night of the soul’, and it is disturbingly prophetic…a black hole where neither light nor language can escape. In Crow’s world the heaviness of History, with its perpetual genocides and wrong turns, crushes hope; mass graves litter the landscape. DNA, with its Darwinian determinism, intertwines with the self-fulfilling prophecies of Christianity in an Apocalyptic danse macabre.”

You may well have heard of this already, but one of the things that emerged from the widespread British arts initiative that coincided with the 2012 London Olympics was an amazing puppet show based on Crow. It was one of the most unique, strange, and moving shows I've seen. A line from Shakespeare kept running through my head as I watched: “Humanity must perforce prey upon itself/Like monsters of the deep.” Here is a "behind the scenes" video: http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-18101705