In a recent interview Hughes said, 'one of the great problems that poetry works at is to renew life, renew the poet's own life, and, by implication, renew the life of the people, if they can respond to the way he has done it for himself'. This book is an attempt to contribute to such a response. The focus is on Hughes's poetry since Crow (1970). The difficulty of this later work often lies in its extreme simplicity, stripped of the surface 'poetry' the conventional critic is trained to respond to.

Many of these poems are sources of great psychic or spiritual power if we can tap them, but our standard critical equipment seems obsolete. The contributors, some established critics and scholars, some young critics bringing fresh and varied approaches to bear, analyze many individual poems and sequences, but also offer, jointly, a new, comprehensive, and unusually integrated reading of one of our greatest living writers.