The Barrie Cooke Archive, Pembroke College, Cambridge

This morning Pembroke College, Cambridge announced their acquisition of a major new resource for the study of the life and work of Ted Hughes in the form of the Barrie Cooke Archive. This collection of letters, photographs, artworks and unpublished poems is the result of the remarkable friendship between Hughes, Seamus Heaney and the British-born Irish painter, Barrie Cooke.

Ted Hughes and Barrie Cooke afloat, pike fishing in Ireland, 1978/9. Credit: Aoine Landweer-Cooke.

The wealth of this material for Hughes studies is immediately apparent from the College’s press-release:

Highlights from Ted Hughes’ pen include 25 vivid letters, written over a span of 30 years, a poem entitled ‘Trenchford on Dartmoor’ written for Cooke and his wife, and a sketch entitled ‘The Dagda meets the Morrigu on the Unshin near Ballinlig’, which offers a wonderful angler’s retelling of Irish mythology. Like the letters, it speaks volumes about fatherhood, writing, fishing and friendship.

Ted Hughes cartoon of the Morrigu eating the Dagda, plus marginal notes and poem ‘Trenchford on Dartmoor’ (1990–92), in the guest book of Barrie Cooke and Jean Valentine. Also poems inscribed by Dennis O’Driscoll and Julie O’Callaghan. Credit: The Estates of Ted Hughes and Dennis O’Driscoll and of Julie O’Callaghan. Photograph by Mark Wormald.

Particularly exciting is the way in which this archive will illumine the centrally important relationship between Hughes and Heaney through their friendship with Cooke.

1 Jan 1985, Black Rock, Dublin. Picture credit Dennis O’Driscoll, reproduced with permission of Estate of Dennis O’Driscoll.

Mark Wormald, English Fellow at Pembroke and Editor Emeritus of The Ted Hughes Society Journal observes:

The tenderness of the letters between these men takes my breath away, and it transforms what we know about their work and personal lives. Ted Hughes emerges as an absolutely devoted father, a wonderfully generous friend, and someone who lived and breathed nature through fishing. And Cooke’s influence on Seamus Heaney, as an artist who was completely committed to the natural and mythological history of Ireland’s waters, was real and enduring, as was the nourishment Heaney took from their friendship.

More insight into the wealth of the new archive can be glimpsed in this short video which Pembroke has produced.

The first public access to the material will be through an exhibition at Pembroke College in 2022, and the archive will be open for scholarship pending cataloguing.

For more information, see the University of Cambridge website.

UPDATE: Pembroke’s announcement has drawn a range of well-deserved media attention in Britain and Ireland. More discussion of the Barrie Cooke Archive can be found below

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-54906863

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/nov/14/treasure-trove-of-unseen-hughes-and-heaney-writing-found

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/news/feral-friend-taught-heaney-hughes-art-wildness/

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/11/14/cambridge-university-publish-share-unique-seamus-heaney-ted

https://www.rte.ie/culture/2020/1113/1178047-seamus-heaney-ted-hughes-and-the-barrie-cooke-archive

Alice Oswald - Oxford Lecture on Ted Hughes's Crow

As part of her appointment as Oxford Professor of Poetry, Alice Oswald will be delivering a public lecture on Thursday 12th November entitled ‘Lines’.

Marking the fiftieth-anniversary of the publication of Hughes’s Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow, Professor Oswald will explore ‘lines and other sound barriers and how Crow flies straight through them’.

The lecture will be available live on Youtube at 17.00 (GMT) 12/11/2020 and will be archived on the Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities (TORCH) Youtube channel afterwards (as well as being available in audio form as a podcast).

New Issue of the Ted Hughes Society Journal (Volume 8, Issue 2)

The Ted Hughes Society is delighted to announce the publication of the latest issue of The Ted Hughes Society Journal:

This issue has been somewhat delayed by the pandemic (amongst other things) but we hope readers will agree the quality of the research on offer has been unaffected. In the issue you will find substantial new articles by Steve Ely and Peter Fydler, exploring such topics as the birth of the Crow project, the collaboration of Leonard Baskin and Hughes on Capriccio, and a new unearthing of the poetic and geographical remnants of Hughes’s relationship with Assia Wevill. Alongside these essays is a report on a recent interdisciplinary conference on the salmon made by Mark Wormald, and reviews of a substantial glut of new, and somewhat controversial, books on Sylvia Plath and Assia Wevill.

The Journal is open access and can be found here.

Gordon Crosse in Conversation...

Here’s another Hughes-related event for the diary, this time an opportunity to hear both a rare performance of a song cycle which Hughes wrote for the composer Gordon Crosse and to hear Crosses’s recollections of the collaboration. The event takes place in Cambridge at Hughes Hall on 26th April from 15.00 :

There will be discussion of Crosse's life and works, together with a performance of the song cycle The New World, based on poems specially written for the composer by Ted Hughes in 1969, the year of the Apollo moon landings. Accompanying the event will a rare chance to view selected items from Hughes Hall’s Ohtake collection, together with examples of Gordon Crosse’s music. 

For more information and to reserve tickets visit https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/making-waves-cello-and-piano-recital-tickets-94118004485.

Discovering Ted Hughes's Yorkshire: Launch of the Three Hebden Royd Trail Maps

There’s more exciting projects coming out of The Ted Hughes Network based at the University of Huddersfield:

On Saturday 21st March, 1.00-3.00pm, a launch event for the Hebden Royd dimension of the ‘Discovering Ted Hughes’s Yorkshire’ literary and heritage trail will take place at Mytholmroyd Community Centre, Calderdale, West Yorkshire, with poetry readings by poets Carola Luther and David Morley, and a short introductory talk by Steve Ely. The event is free of charge and the formal aspects of the event will be prefaced by a wine reception—all are welcome.

‘Discovering Ted Hughes’s Yorkshire’ is a series of six trail maps commissioned by the Ted Hughes Network at Huddersfield University and designed by Hebden Bridge cartographer Chris Goddard.  The commissioning and printing of the maps was made possible by generous funding from Hebden Royd Town Council

As THS members well know, Hughes was born in Mytholmroyd, West Yorkshire, grew up in Mexborough, South Yorkshire and completed his national service in Patrington, East Yorkshire.  By the time he went to Cambridge University at the age of 21 he was largely formed as the poet of his subsequent fame. The ‘Discovering Ted Hughes’s Yorkshire’ trail maps, informed by up-to-date scholarship and local expertise will open-up all three of Hughes’s Yorkshire landscapes to local people and tourists alike. 

The three Hebden Royd maps— focused on Mytholmroyd, Crimsworth Dean and Colden Clough/Heptonstall—are the first fruits of the project and have been made possible by the generous support and funding provided by Hebden Royd Town Council. Copies of trail maps will be distributed free at the launch and will subsequently be made available to the public via retail outlets and as free downloads from the Ted Hughes Network website, potentially opening-up the trails to a global audience. The other three maps—two based in the Mexborough area and one in Patrington—will be launched and made available in the summer.

The trail maps will allow people to self-guide around Hughes’s Hebden Royd landscapes, but a range of more formal activities are planned to publicise the trails and to encourage people to engage with Hughes’s work and legacy in the area, including school and community creative writing workshops and a range of guided walks.  All the activities will be publicised locally and more widely and will be free of charge. During the activities, participants will not only find out more about Hughes’s life and work and how it relates to the region, but through that work will engage with creativity, local heritage, landscape, ecology and environment.

Mark Hinchliffe

It is with great sadness that we report the peaceful death of Mark Hinchliffe on 14 November 2019 after a period of illness. Mark was Chair of the Elmet Trust and a wonderfully kind and generous supporter of Ted Hughes studies.

In his quiet and gentle manner he managed to maintain friendships with the Hughes family and all in the community of scholars and enthusiasts for the work and life of Ted Hughes. For twenty years Mark corresponded with Hughes following a schoolboy discovery of the poetry and two letters are included in Letters of Ted Hughes, from 1978 and 1996.

A collector of Hughes’s books and manuscripts, Mark was the obvious person to write about Hughes’s publication history for Ted Hughes in Context. A casual conversation with Mark would be followed a few days later by a copy of a rare document, sent from the sheer joy of sharing the power of Hughes’s work.

We shall all miss Mark’s quiet enthusiasm and the dignity of its sincerity. Hughes’s birthday dinners in Mytholmroyd will never be the same. Our condolences and thoughts go to Julie, who will know, as we cannot, how fortunate she has been to be married to our gracious and much missed friend.

Terry Gifford

Chair, Ted Hughes Society

Ted Hughes Network Event - 'A French Perspective on Dialect in English Poetry'

There’s an upcoming event being hosted by the Ted Hughes Network in Huddersfield which may be of interest to Society members and other readers of Hughes.

As part of their on-going English Literature & Creative Writing Postgraduate Seminar Series Claire Helie from the University of Lille will be giving the paper, 'A French Perspective on Dialect in English Poetry'. Claire has written on Ted Hughes, Tony Harrison and Simon Armitage among others.

Claire is also organising a conference on Simon Armitage at the University of Lille next year.

The talk will be held 12.15-1.15, Wednesday 20th November, in Room OA6/08 of the Oastler Building, University of Huddersfield.

New Issue of the Ted Hughes Society Journal (Volume 8, Issue 1)

The Ted Hughes Society is pleased to announce the publication of the next issue of The Ted Hughes Society Journal.

This issue features three further articles arising from the 8th International Ted Hughes Conference at Gregynog Hall, and also includes a moving tribute to the critic Al Alvarez who died last month. The papers gathered in this issue are truly international in scope, ranging from explorations of Hughes’s time in Massachusetts and in Cambridge to his engagement with Hindu mythology. There is also an evocative account of a recent walk undertaken by Society members to visit Hughes’s memorial stone, and – in a piece by out-going editor Mark Wormald which will significantly change the ways in which one of Hughes’s most famous poems is understood – the issue also explores his creative engagement with the life and gender of the pike.

This issue of the Journal is open access, and can be found here.

Ted Hughes Bibliography

The Ted Hughes Society is proud to announce the publication of the next update to the Ted Hughes Bibliography, available here on our website.

This document represents a continuation of the bibliography published by Keith Sagar and Stephen Tabor, and is the result of many months of hard work by the Society’s bibliographer Katherine Robinson (and before her the Society’s previous bibliographer, Danny O’Connor).

We hope that this bibliography will prove a major resource for all scholars and readers of Hughes, and our aim is to keep it regularly updated. To whit - please do send any additions or corrections to Katherine and we’ll endeavour to include them as soon as possible.

At present, the Bibliography is available as a downloadable document, and a web-version will be published in the coming months.

This kind of research work is only made possible by the kind support of Ted Hughes Society members. For information on how to join the Society and support our work, please see our Membership page.

The 2019 Ted Hughes Poetry Festival

This September will see the return of the Ted Hughes Poetry Festival to Mexborough, South Yorkshire - a place with deep Hughesian roots… The Festival runs from 11th to 14th September and will include readings and workshops featuring poets as diverse as Andrew McMillan, Raymond Antrobus (winner of the 2019 Ted Hughes Award) and Society-member Yvonne Reddick.

For more information on this year’s programme and to book tickets to events, check out the festival’s website.

The brochure for the festival, with full listings can be downloaded here.

Ted Hughes Walks in Summer 2019

For the more intrepid readers of Hughes amongst us, there are some exciting events this summer.

First of all, the Ted Hughes Network are organising walking tours of Hughes’s Upper Calder Valley. Steve Ely, the Director of the Network writes:

A group of us from the Ted Hughes Network at Huddersfield are walking Hughes’s Upper Calder Valley (2 more-or-less full days of walking, Friday 14th and Friday 28th June, both walks beginning at 9.30am in Mytholmroyd) with cartographer Christopher Goddard, who we’ve commissioned to create three literary trail maps for our ‘Discovering Ted Hughes’s Yorkshire’ project. 

The trails are: Mytholmroyd and environs; Stubbing Wharf–Colden Valley-Heptonstall circular and Crimsworth Dene.  We’ll matching locations to poems, other writings and Hughes’s life, drawing extensively on the local researches of Donald Crossley, Nick Wilding and Ruth Crossley as well as the work of the scholarly community.

If any Society members would like to join us they’d be more than welcome.  Anyone interested should drop me an email for more details.

The Ted Hughes memorial stone, Dartmoor.

Then the Ted Hughes Society itself is offering a series of occasional walks. The first of these will be led by Mark Wormald to the Ted Hughes memorial stone on Dartmoor. Meet at the car park just north of Belstone (south of the A30) at 10am on Friday 2 August (OS map OL28 'Dartmoor' : 621938). Please check the details of this walk and be prepared for it: http://www.bbc.co.uk/devon/outdoors/walks/ted_hughes_memorial.shtml

When you are sure that you are coming it would be useful to let Prof. Terry Gifford, the Chair of the Ted Hughes Society know via email.

New Poet Laureate: Simon Armitage

Over the weekend you may have heard the news that Simon Armitage - a longtime friend and supporter of the Ted Hughes Society - was appointed to be the Poet Laureate. Professor Terry Gifford, the Chair of the Society, writes:

The Ted Hughes Society offers congratulations to the new Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage, whose championing of the work of Hughes over the years has supported both ordinary, and especially young, readers of Hughes, together with Hughes scholarship. Of course this appointment is a recognition of Simon's own poetry and his work on behalf of poetry. As he writes in 'Thank You for Waiting': 'We now extend our invitation to Exclusive, Superior, Privilege and Excelsior members' right down to 'Sludge, Clinker, Splinter and Soot: / all you people are now free to board'. We will and are looking forward to the ride.

Terry Gifford

Chair, Ted Hughes Society

In this video, Simon talks about some of his hopes for his new position as Laureate, starting with an acknowledgement of the role Ted Hughes played in ‘waking up’ a sleepy student to the reality that ‘poetry was going to be my thing’:

Roger Furniss: Ted Hughes and Exmoor's Rivers

For those who are lucky enough to live in or have access to the South West of England this month, there’s an exciting Hughes-related event taking place as part of the Simonsbath Festival. On Wednesday 22nd May 2019 at 19.30 in St Luke’s Church, Simonsbath, Roger Furniss - a friend of Hughes’s from the Devonian fishing community - will give a talk on Hughes’s love of the rivers of Devon, fishing and on the current conservation efforts on these rivers.

To read more about the event - which will also feature a reading of some of Hughes’s poetry, please see the event listing where you can also purchase tickets.

New Issue of The Ted Hughes Society Journal

After what was a very busy year for Hughes Studies, 2019 is starting with another significant development, the new issue of The Ted Hughes Society Journal.

This issue represents the first publication to be drawn from the 8th International Ted Hughes Conference, ‘Poetry in the Making’, hosted by Cardiff University in August 2018. There are essays on a range of aspects of Hughes’s work, including a re-evaluation of his relationship with Philip Larkin, an exploration of the cultural history of Hughes’s Devon, and a consideration of his engagement with the work of Dante. Also sure to be of interest is a cogent critique of the somewhat-perplexing news coverage of the supposed debt of Hughes’s poem ‘Pike’ to the work of Amy Lowell.

This issue of the Journal is open access and can be found here.

Modern Poetry in Translation - Hungary and Ted Hughes

Continuing the recent trend of news surrounding Ted Hughes and translation, the latest issue of Modern Poetry in Translation will be of significant interest to all Hughes readers.

In a Winter City: Hungary and Ted Hughes is a special issue of the magazine published to mark the 20th anniversary of Hughes’s death and to fulfill some of the poet’s plans for the magazine he co-founded in 1965 with Daniel Weissbort by offering a focus on the poetry of Hungary.

The issue can be ordered either as part of a subscription to the magazine or individually.

Five Views of Ted Hughes

Hughes has been much in the media of late, with a recent sequence of BBC Radio 3’s The Essay dedicated to ‘Five Views of Ted Hughes’.

These broadcasts (available on the BBC website throughout the world) feature five contemporary poets exploring five aspects of Hughes’s work, beginning with current Oxford Professor of Poetry (and long-time friend to the Society) talking on ‘Hughes and Tenderness’.

To hear these essays in full, visit the BBC website or else subscribe to the podcast version of The Essay, available throughout the world.

New Ted Hughes Letters at the British Library

The British Library recently acquired the correspondence from Ted Hughes to Elizabeth Hicklin (nee Grattidge), a girlfriend of Hughes’s at Cambridge, prior to his meeting with Sylvia Plath.

To announce the opening of this important addition to the Hughes archive at the British Library, Hughes scholar and Society member Di Beddow has written a brilliant account of the background to the acquisition, Hughes’s relationship with Hicklin and the exciting avenues these letters promise to open in the study of Hughes’s earliest work.

For those who have yet to explore the substantial (and publicly available) Hughes resources available at the BL, their ‘Ted Hughes: Discovering Literature’ page is a great place to start.

Ted Hughes and Shakespeare

In July 2018 Robert McCrum delivered the Ted Hughes Memorial lecture as part of the Ways with Words Festival of Words and Ideas at Dartington Hall.

For those who weren’t lucky enough to hear this lecture in person, there is now an essay version available on the Guardian website.

This is a lucid and helpful charting of the many complex pathways through Hughes’s Shakespearean labyrinth, and would make a great starting point for anyone contemplating starting in on Hughes’s longest work, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being.

Ted Hughes's Translations - A Modern Poetry in Translation Event

One of the most important of Ted Hughes’s many contributions to the life of poetry beyond his own writing was his co-founding of the journal Modern Poetry in Translation. To mark the twentieth anniversary of his death, MPT are now hosting an evening dedicated to Hughes’s own translation work.

A combination of readings of Hughes’s translations, discussion and the chance to hear new poetry written in response to these works, the event is taking place at The Other Palace on 10th October 2018.

Admission is free, but booking is essential. For more information and to book tickets please visit the event’s website.

The Iron Woman - Musical Stage Adaptation

Some exciting news has come out via Faber and Faber about a new musical adaptation of Ted Hughes’s The Iron Woman, to be staged in a workshop production 12th-13th October 2018 at The Other Palace, Victoria, London.

Adapted from Hughes’s children’s book by Mike Kenny, with songs by Pippa Cleary and directed by Luke Sheppard, the production will be a unique chance to see this environmental fable brought to life, twenty five years after its first publication.

For more information and to book tickets for the performances, please visit The Other Palace website.

And here is Faber’s press release for the event.