Ted Hughes is my Great Crime influence and he's at his best in "Crow" (1972).
Hughes, here, uses an embodies his animal-human trickster figure "Crow" to show us all about the world we live in. About the human soul. And the world and our bodies are made of violence, death, murder-- all the murders of History and of our history, our devouring.
There are tears, yes. But, really, this stops nothing. It just makes the barbed wire drag and snag.
Whenever I return to Ted Hughes' work I am jolted with dark light.
here's a poem from "Crow"
Crow Tyrannosaurus
Creation quaked voices--
It was a cortege
Of mourning and lament
Crow could hear and he looked around fearfully.
The swift's body fled past
Pulsating
With insects
And their anguish, all it had eaten.
The cat's body writhed
Gagging
A tunnel
Of incoming death-struggles, sorrow on sorrow.
And the dog was a bulging filterbag
Of all the deaths it had gulped for the flesh and the bones.
It could not digest their screeching finales.
Its shapeless cry was a blort of all those voices.
Even man he was a walking
Abattoir
Of innocents--
His brain incinerating their outcry.
Crow thought 'Alas
Alas ought I
To stop eating
And try to become the light?'
But his eye saw a grub. And his head, trapsprung, stabbed.
And he listened
And he heard
Weeping
Grubs grubs He stabbed he stabbed
Weeping
Weeping
Weeping he walked and stabbed
Thus came the eye's/ roundness
the ear's/ deafness.
