DANNY O’CONNOR. Ted Hughes and Trauma: Burning the Foxes.

Any book which departs from the comforting idea of Ted Hughes the nature poet—less an upstart Crow than a kind of benign Heathcliff gone soft round the edges, a figure in whom we find confirmed our green credentials—will today stand out. Danny O’Connor’s book, with its theoretical twists and turns, its grappling with the poems not as missives from the earth but as knotty Lacanian problems, which in the process of being unravelled lead only to conceptual impossibilities and contradictions, is admirably perverse.