Arbie's Unoriginally Titled Book Blog
It's a blog! Mainly of book reviews.
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I've not read any other translations of Ovid and I don't know Latin, so I have little choice but to take these selections from the Metamorphoses at face value.
That value is very high: Hughes writes gripping, driving poetry that impatiently whips you along the narrative, with hardly a chance to catch your breathe sometimes. Faster paced than many a novel, there is no chance of being lulled to sleep by endless iambs here. Startling, powerful, often brutal metaphors pay no heed to shouts of "Anachronism!" and use whatever image suits Hughes' purpose. There is hardly a dull moment in the entire volume.
Anybody who thought narrative poetry was dead needs to think again: Hughes brought nature observation back to the fore-front of modern poetry with The Hawk in the Rain and subsequent volumes; here he rescues narrative verse from the Romantics and gives it to anybody who loves a good story. Further - if you had no interest in the Classics before, you will after reading this.
I have to look back to Crow to find the previous volume of Hughes' poetical works that I responded to so uniformly positively.