Remains of Elmet

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Godwin appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs programme in 2002. Here’s what she chose as her eight favourite pieces of music. As she sits overlooking the beach near her home, Fay Godwin’s eyes sadden. The 73-year old photographer is not in the best of health these days, and while mentally she’s still as sharp as the photographs that made her famous, her ailing heart leaves her with little energy for taking photographs. True as this may have been, a close examination of the sequence suggests that this is not the whole story; and it is as well to recall Sylvia Plath’s warning to her mother not to take Hughes’ explanations too seriously. Referring to one of Hughes’ early plays she wrote: He is so critical of the play … that he needs to invent elaborate disguises as a smokescreen for it ( Letters Home 16 Dec. 1960). All upcoming public events are going ahead as planned and you can find more information on our events blog

As Hughes’ certainty about this strengthened, he came to see the hunting of poems not only as a way of immersing himself in Natures energies, but also as means by which more of such healing energies might be returned to the world. He was convinced, too, of the power of the imaginative arts to both destroy and heal. Throughout his working life he presented these views many times: in particular, his discussion of Crow with Egbert Faas in 1971 ( UU.197–208); his two essays on ‘Myth and Education’ ( WP.136–153 3); and his ‘Panegyric and Ode: The Hanged Man and the Dragonfly’ ( WP.84–102), express them forcefully. Thus, with typical care and precision, Hughes chose as a symbol of his own role a creature which represents the powers of the Goddess here on Earth. Being amphibious, it moves with shamanic ease between water and land, linking the two worlds to which we belong – the watery world from which we came in prehistoric times and which also (for Hughes) represented the unconscious energies and our present land–based, reason–dominated world. Because of such shamanic powers, Hughes‘ prophecies of disaster are not untempered with hope. In his role of poet/shaman/alchemist, he not only poetically transforms the death of the Calder Valley society into a spiritual re–birth (‘Heptonstall Cemetery’ ( ROE.122)), he also brings to us some transforming imaginative energies which might allow us to attain our own enlightenment and spiritual release. criminals, a hide-out for refugees. Then in the early 1800s it became the cradle for the Industrial Revolution in Major retrospective at the Barbican Centre in London , with accompanying publication, Landmarks, published by Dewi Lewis.

Born Berlin , Germany . Father a British diplomat, mother an American artist. Educated at various schools all over the world. Heptonstall’ ( ROE.92) is Hughes’ lament for all these old people and their aged disintegrating world.

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Godwin has long been associated with clunking medium-format cameras and leggy tripods. She refuses to endorse any particular system (although I know full well she was a fan of a certain Swedish manufacturer). But in conversation she lets it slip that she has recently bought a Minolta DiMage digital compact and has become hooked on her new-found medium.

Recipient of major award from Arts Council of Great Britain to continue landscape work in British Isles , much of which is included in Land. More frequently, it seems that Hughes provided a simple explanation for his work which masked its real complexity, exactly as he did in the programme notes for the Ilkley Festival performance of Cave Birds.

Critical reaction to Remains of Elmet when it was published was muted in comparison with the excesses to which some reviewers had been prompted by Hughes’ earlier work. Some who were habitually roused to aggression by Hughes’ poetry accused him, yet again, of violence and “ primal drum–thumping” 2, but the tone of the Elmet sequence was sufficiently different to cause even Hughes’ most determined critics to change their complaints. Instead of violence, they accused him of writing poems “ neither dynamic nor absolute” but “ melodramatic” 3; and of being “ perverse and inverted to a point of indulgent nastiness” whilst, at the same time, repelling the critic by his “ extreme ordinariness of language” 4. https://www.nature.com/news/uk-mapped-out-by-genetic-ancestry-1.17136 citing Leslie, S., Winney, B., Hellenthal, G. et al. The fine-scale genetic structure of the British population. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14230