Books in Brief: Moortown

Moortown, by Ted Hughes (Harper & Row, 182 pp., $10.95). Ted Hughes is the most forceful of present-day English poets and, with the possible exception of Derek Walcott, the most forceful writing in English. His style is stripped, direct, totally lacking in rhetoric or ambiguity, and like Robinson Jeffers’s (which it resembles) dedicated to presenting nature as a desperate struggle for survival and man as an uncompassionate observer of that struggle seeking to turn it to his advantage. Prometheus, who, in the Greek myth, underwent daily agony because he defied the gods in behalf of humanity, is presented by Hughes, in a series of poems, as a stoic sufferer without any redeeming sense of purpose. The title sequence, relating incidents in a year spent raising cattle and sheep with his father-in-law in Devon, comes closer than any other of Hughes’s poems to establishing a sympathetic relationship between drivers and driven. In one of the poems, “New Year Exhilaration,” a storm cleanses the cruel world with a sense of exaltation:

The river

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Moortown, by Ted Hughes (Harper & Row, 182 pp., $10.95). Ted Hughes is the most forceful of present-day English poets and, with the possible exception of Derek Walcott, the most forceful writing in English. His style is stripped, direct, totally lacking in rhetoric or ambiguity, and like Robinson Jeffers’s (which it resembles) dedicated to presenting nature as a desperate struggle for survival and man as an uncompassionate observer of that struggle seeking to turn it to his advantage. Prometheus, who, in the Greek myth, underwent daily agony because he defied the gods in behalf of humanity, is presented by Hughes, in a series of poems, as a stoic sufferer without any redeeming sense of purpose. The title sequence, relating incidents in a year spent raising cattle and sheep with his father-in-law in Devon, comes closer than any other of Hughes’s poems to establishing a sympathetic relationship between drivers and driven. In one of the poems, “New Year Exhilaration,” a storm cleanses the cruel world with a sense of exaltation:

The river