Where is my previous review?: ...The gist of it was this: Crow is one of the best books of poetry published in the last 50 years...

Entertaining and interesting, this collection ranges from melancholy observations to dark questions and theories, based on and around the character of Crow Hughes used for this project. As a collection, the poems hold together an odd panorama of questions and sentiments (in many cases anger or distrust) that question life, religion, and philosophy. It's a dark book, but the poems are worthwhile, with quite a few being ones that I'll come back to many times. ( )

Hughes most famous work, and no wonder--it is nothing less than the greatest single effort at personal mythology since T S Eliot's Waste Land. ( )

This was once on my list of ten books I'd take to a desert island. That was in college and it has since been supplanted by many other books, but it remains one of my favorite poetry books, being the stories of Crow, a "blacker than black, ragged, murderous scavenger concerned mainly with his own survival". ( )

Crow was Ted Hughes's fourth book of poems for adults and a pivotal moment in his writing career. In it, he found both a structure and a persona that gave his vision a new power and coherence. A. Alvarez wrote in the Observer, 'Each fresh encounter with despair becomes the occasion for a separate, almost funny, story in which natural forces and creatures, mythic figures, even parts of the body, act out their special roles, each endowed with its own irrepressible life. With Crow, Hughes joins the select band of survivor-poets whose work is adequate to the destructive reality we inhabit'.