The fourteen contributors to this new collection of essays begin with Ted Hughes's proposition
that 'every child is nature's chance to correct culture's error.' Established Hughes scholars
alongside new voices draw on a range of approaches to explore the intricate relationships
between the natural world and cultural environments - political as well as geographical -
which his work unsettles. Combining close readings of his encounters with animals and places
and explorations of the poets who influenced him these essays reveal Ted Hughes as a writer we
still urgently need. Hughes helps us manage in his words 'the powers of the inner world and
the stubborn conditions of the other world under which ordinary men and women have to live'.
