Admirers of Ann Skea’s work will be delighted to see that she has just made available, online, and via her website, an ebook version of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest, which was first published by the University of New England Press in 1994. The book examines Hughes’ creative alchemy in Cave Birds, Remains of Elmet and River, and draws on Skea’s own correspondence with Hughes and on unpublished material from original manuscripts.
While preserving the essence of her argument and the bulk of her text, Ann Skea has taken the opportunity to provide some discreet but important updates, both in format — re-organizing the illustrations from Alchemical manuscripts and from the work of William Blake she originally provided to ensure a more dialogue between her text and images, and adding images, including book covers and her own photographs and illustrations — and in other details, including discreet rephrasings where the passage of time since her book’s original publication demands it. Other deft and graceful additions include incorporated addenda and appendices she has published elsewhere, for instance about the negotiations between Hughes, Peter Keen, and the publishers that led to the publication of River in 1983; and she has also revisited footnotes and in-text references to acknowledge Paul Keegan’s edition of the Collected Poems and Christopher Reid’s edition of the Letters.
The Poetic Quest is freely available at: https://ann.skea.com/PQIndex.html