Crow (From the Life and Songs of the Crow) - Ted Hughes

Overview
Crow: From the life and songs of the Crow is a collection of poems detailing the life of fictional character Crow, written in 1970 by former poet laureate Ted Hughes. It is regarded as one of the crowning achievements of a long and distinguished career in poetry.

Review
Imagine, if you will, a being of pure, unalloyed darkness. With neither place nor purpose in God's freshly cast creation. Neither loved nor wanted. A mystery of existence, searching for meaning (and discarded ice creams) in a sad and lonely world. A place of emptiness and tragedy. A world we can so easily recognise...

Enter Crow.

Crow is a legendary creature, living out a mythic existence, transcending time, and even death's cold grip in a world formed of a bizarre blend of various mythologies, deeply entrenched in dense religious symbolism. Crow shares much of the faults and follies of man. He goes through much the same agonies of growing up and trying to find his place in the world. Like mankind, he too lapses into the throes of existential and theological angst.

He is our hero in a world in which God is very much fallible, and in which there is not necessarily a reason nor a rhyme to anything. Such is the dark and brutal nature of existence within the unremittingly bleak world view put forward in this joyously dark book. A nihilistic nightmare of epic proportions into which Crow, our hero, fits so well. After all, what is blacker than Crow?

Crow himself is a masterful creation. An ingenious blend of simple Corvus Corvidae- common crow, running on instinct and simple animalistic cruelty. And transcendental immortal with godlike powers. As a hero he is far from typical. Gods attempts to civilize Crow are a disastrous failure. As a character he is pitiless, soulless, neither good nor pure evil, but throughout his life, cuts his own path, answering to no one, doing whatever the hell he likes. Infinitely dark, created from nothing. In the end he is the anti-hero of all anti-heroes, a lovable trickster with a blacker than black humour. Quite literally; a thorn in God's side. Crow's own world view can be eventually boiled down to; everyone can go to hell, I'm fantastic.

There's no other way of putting it: Crow is, in spite of, or perhaps because of his wicked ways, cool.

Make no mistake though, Crow is no angel. In addition to being incredibly arrogant and egotistical, incapable of love but for himself, he does some pretty terrible things and is capable of unspeakable acts of cruelty and heartlessness. This is not portrayed as wickedness as we would understand it, but more just the natural cruelty of mother nature, raising an unpleasant mirror to humanity and our own, often animal-like behaviour. In the end Crow's own worst enemy is himself. He effectively tears apart the universe looking for 'the Black Beast' that apparently represents the origins of all his fear and doubt, failing to see the irony in his quest.

The poetry of Crow consists of actually quite simple, often intentionally basic verse. The overall effect is a raw and starkly beautiful combination of words that can leave you, like Crow in Crow goes hunting, while watching a hare; "speechless with admiration". And it is because there is so little detail that such profundity is achieved. Simply because our minds can conjure infinitely more imagination, and impart more depth and scale of meaning than any amount of words can ever possibly hope to convey. So Hughes paints his word pictures with broad strokes and allows us to fill in the gaps with our own unique thoughts and interpretations.

Within these poems there is little warmth to be found. Only cold, bleak darkness and nothingness. That's not to say they are depressing. Far from it. This theme allows for endless flourishes of malevolent humour from a creation perfectly poised to reflect on our own infernal natures as well as the nature of existence in general.

There is so much scope and depth to what is such a thin book of quite short and snappy poems (89 pages and 67 poems) that one can re-read and re-read, and find new meaning and depth in every word, of every line, of every verse, of very poem. Believe me such hyperbole is required to get across the often breathtaking impact of some of the poems contained within this stunning collection.

To try to find the intended meaning in some of them is difficult and ultimately impossible, but by no means pointless. There are a limitless number of interpretations one could make, each as correct as the last. But the best thing you can say about them is that everyone will read something different and find their own levels of meaning within the haunting, often devastatingly beautiful words.

For instance, in one of my favourite poems, Crow's Fall, Crow decides that the sun is "...glows much too whitely..." (nothing to do with Countdown) and that therefore:
"...he must attack it and defeat it".
The ridiculous reasoning and mis-placed pride and optimism of such a daring but doomed challenge is part of the reason Crow is such an ingenious character. There is much more to this poem than that though, indeed I could spend the rest of the review examining it. In the end Crow inevitably loses, returning "charred black". However he interprets events thus:
"Up there, where white is black and black is white, I won."
At first I wondered why he would declare victory when quite evidently, he had lost. Personally I think that this can be read as; up there where things are not as they are, I won. So essentially then: I lost. Said in such a roundabout way because Crow is far too proud to simply admit defeat.

(So next time you lose at something you know what to say. Confusing people is fun.)

Though you can read it in a numberless amount of ways and that's half the fun. In the end though you can simply say, well, its a damn fine piece of poetry because if it wasn't, you wouldn't care what it meant.

If you do ever get into the wonderfully warped world of Crow. (And I obviously recommend that you do.) You may wonder why it is that you hadn't heard of it before. Surely such a masterpiece deserves wider appreciation and recognition. Perhaps its audience is limited somewhat by the woefully bleak themes and at times brutally detailed descriptions of violence and erm.. anatomy. But if you look beneath all that and survive the initial onslaught of barbarity that is Crow's formative years. (Oh, his poor mother.) Then you'll be treated to something really quite special. Special, even if, like myself, you don't normally read poetry. In the end, despite the blood and claw veneer, there are some good, affecting sentiments raised in Crow, and the overall message is quite a positive one:-

Ultimately suggestive of hope for the future. In spite of everything. And I think we could all do with a bit of that right now.

Summary: Possibly the finest work of possibly the finest poet of his
generation.