Ted Hughes' poetry is generally pretty strange, but Wodwo is definitely the collection that I'm pegging as the strangest I've encountered yet. According to the general consensus online from professional reviewers this collection did signal a drastic change in his writing style after the suicide of his wife, Sylvia Plath, so I guess I'm not alone in my judgement. That being said, the collection was actually pretty interesting, even though I can't say I understood all of it.

I'm a fan of Hughes' poetry in general though, so seeing this cllection where he's beginning todevelop a more amorphous style is crucial in reading his ouevre. He treats on themes around relgion and mythology, which came to dominate later collection like Crow, but the animal imagery and and stark realism that defined his early work are still present. The poems that deal with teh biblical serpent definitely stood out as collection favourites, because I can't help but enjoy his tongue in cheek treatment of the oft-maligned anti-hero, but I also enjoyed his more innocent poems that explore the wonder and fantasy of childhood as well.

The second section of this book, which is comprised onf short stories lost me a bit, to be honest. Hughes has an excellent way of telling stories, but I found most of these pieces subtly upsetting and some here downright terrifying in a way that I don't get out of his poems. I don't think that the stories were meant to be what we generally classify as the horror/thriller genre, but they explore themes around mankind's primal fears and challenges - aloneness in the universe, the darkness beyond our created light sources, and the fear of and need for control of the natural world.

I also didn't enjoy the play included here, because I'm not much of a fanof surrealist theatre and it was rather tricky to make sense of it. Once I got to the end the whole thing made sense as a fever dream of a soldier with a head wound, but getting there was a bit of a drag.

At least Hughes cautions readers in the prelude that they can choose to ignore the stories and plays included here or to treat them as footnotes. I was a bit surprised by this pre-emptory statement, but after having finished reading everything cover to cover I can definitely say that my enjoyment of this book would have been more without the so-called footnotes. But we still come away with some excellent poetry from this collection, an introduction to the new style of Hughes, and we can see the beginnings of the even more strange and delightful poetry that he will come to write. ( )

Wodwo was Hughes' second published poetry collection. I'd read all the poems before in [b:Collected Poems|149505|Collected Poems|Ted Hughes|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172203055s/149505.jpg|1809812] and many are very familiar from many years of reading Hughes' work. What came as a surprise and made me buy this seperately is that the book comes in three parts; some short stories (and one play) sandwiched by two sets of poems. These aren't collected in Collected Poems and I had never even heard of Hughes writing prose fiction aimed at adults. The stories (and play) are difficult in that they are overtly symbolic and more or less cryptic. The connecting theme is transformation. The first story, The Rain Horse (easily my favourite) has the protagonist menaced by a horse on open farm land; he desperately flees the strangely behaving creature. The play (last of the prose works) has a wounded soldier experiencing a surreal march toward the home lines to get treatment. He is unable to escape his nightmare.

From reading [b:Selected Letters Ted Hughes|2502449|Selected Letters Ted Hughes|Ted Hughes|http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51nrBB+E3oL._SL75_.jpg|2509814] it becomes clear that Hughes felt a psychological transformation occurring within him whilst writing the material for this book, so that the poems fell into two distinct tonal groups, representing before and after the change. The prose works subconciously ended up representing the change itself: The first shows Hughes struggling to reject the change, the last the inevitability, unavoidability of it.

Whatever this transformation was, it is visible in the poetry: Part 1 is tonally similar to Hawk in the Rain, Hughes first collection. Part 3 is the first step down the road that would lead to Crow.

I strongly recommend that Hughes fans who haven't already, get hold of this book and read it through linearly from beginning to end, bearing in mind the above comments. ( )