NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

Several times in the course of his life, Ted Hughes told the story of a scary dream he had at Cambridge. A creature with the body of a man and the head of a fox and the smell of burnt flesh walked into his room, laid a bleeding hand on the essay he was writing, and said, "Stop this — you are destroying us." With a laudable confidence in his own instinct for oneirology, Hughes took this as a sign that he was meant to drop out of English Lit and study Archaeology and Anthropology instead.

Luckily, the vulpine vision had appeared just in the nick of time and Hughes didn't lose his poetic mojo. He proved this, the critics assure us, with THE THOUGHT FOX:

	with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
	It enters the dark hole of the head.
	The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
	The page is printed.

	what these things mean
	about people and beasts and a poet and time
	and the patterns of chance, or design.

Set against chance are the poems of design. MR SHEEHAN is a sinister Frankenstein story; CREATION contains directions to grow your own. And if myth is the means to make events appear fated, A SEA FAMILY is swimming in it. Wakeman creates new myths and retells the old ones. I skipped a breath at the revelation that it was Eurydice's doing all along:

		how her soft feet faltered,
	Her soft hands shut his singing mouth
	and turned him to her in the growing light.