Hawk In The Rain

"If people have never read Ted Hughes then they’ve got to read Hawk in the Rain . It was his first collection, and it’s wonderful. Ted Hughes is one of the gods of poetry, along with Seamus Heaney and R S Thomas, and I always listen very carefully to what the gods say. I remember Ted Hughes said, ‘Never throw anything away. Put the poem in a drawer and one day an energy will come and the dead poem will come alive.’ His poems have wild power, and the language stays in the mind, as does all good poetry. No stormy night happens without my thinking, ‘This house has been far out at sea all night’, and every hawk in the rain is his. His manners are biting off heads, I think, when I see the elegant, beautiful red kite over our garden. Seamus Heaney is another god, and I feel like I’ve got a lot in common with him: farming ancestors and the Celtic background. He said he liked to write a sonnet and rough it up a bit. The roughing up a bit, he says, sets them free. So gods like Seamus and Ted Hughes would tell you not to obey rules mindlessly."