Best poetry

Hughes's poems of middle age are his real masterpieces – especially the farm poems from Moor-town, the lovely poems of fancy that he collected in Season Songs and the oblique reminiscences of his Yorkshire childhood in Remains of Elmet. The fortunes of this last book have been harmed by its look-ing so pretty, with its large pages and the

l i t e r a r y l i v e s

memorable photographs by Fay Godwin, but it must be one of the best volumes of verse of the second half of the century, up there with Larkin's High Windows and Heaney's Field Work.