"For more than forty years - from his debut, The Hawk in the Rain (1957), to Birthday Letters (1998) - Ted Hughes was one of the English language's truly prodigious poets. This volume gathers all of his work, from his earliest poems (published only in journals) through the groundbreaking volumes Crow (1970), Gaudete (1977), and Tales from Ovid (1977). It includes poems Hughes composed for fine-press printers, poems he wrote as England's Poet Laureate, and those children's poems that he meant for adults as well. This omnium-gatherum of Hughes's work is animated throughout by a voice that, as Seamus Heaney remarked, was simply "longer and deeper and rougher" than those of his contemporaries."--BOOK JACKET.