From the previous poet laureate, this
collection of
poems swims with delightful – and many less-than-
delightful – sea characters, and all their stories are told with the warmth,
humanity and insight that characterises his style. Flora McDonnell
imaginatively illustrates this (1999) edition in monochrome style.
“The Mermaid’s Purse”, the title poem, is a play on words of a Mermaid
seeking an aspirin in her “purse” where she is so startled to find a shark
that her headache (and her head) have gone. Written in a matter-of-fact
deadpan way the word play prevents it from being other than dark
comedy. In comparison “
Shell” with its accompanying picture of a small
boy holding his shell to his ear in a
huge, wild, overpowering landscape-
cum-seascape, captures the strange haunting effect of the sea that can
follow the shell’s listener wherever he goes.
Ted Hughes draws comic if sometimes gruesome comparisons in some
of his depictions. The crab is a set of tools with pliers and pinchers; the
lobster used to be a knight in armour, but the sea jumbled his parts up,
and reassembled him wrongly; and the cormorant can be likened to a
drowned fisherman.
A dark humour is especially evident in the poems of the sea anemone,
who like a femme fatale entraps with her charm; the waiting octopus
who sings of being a bride and is illustrated in the sea below a boatman,
her arms waving and her huge eyes fascinating; and the Jellyfish who
offers a warning against its own fatal attraction.
There is hidden
beauty in even the most unpromising
creatures: a pearl
in a mussel; the china-blue eyes of a sand flea; the shadows of flocks of
waltzing gulls. Even a shipwreck can look like a flower deteriorating in
its own rust.
Creatures of the deep, the shallows, and of sea-fantasy are
collected here and whether with comedy, looming beauty or sudden tragic death
the sea is portrayed in the complexity of its darker moods in a typically
unsentimental way. Ted Hughes was in his milieu in the countryside, and
his poems reflect all things natural. He wrote several books for children
including “Season Songs”, “Under the North Star”, and “Collected Animal
Poems”.