Forty years after it was first published, Ted Hughes’s Flowers and Insects, Some Birds and a Pair of Spiders is presented in a beautifully redesigned edition with a new introduction by the nature writer Tim Dee. The sixteen poems gathered here brim and bristle with the life Hughes generates from the absolute attention he commits to whatever it is he is looking at. His knack for finding a language to animate its subject, without a trace of sentiment or nostalgia, singles out Hughes as one of the truly great poet-interpreters of the natural world. This edition gives full justice to the subtlety of the original watercolour illustrations, produced by Hughes’s long-term collaborator and friend, the American artist, Leonard Baskin.
