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Books

In Crow’s dark shadow

If only Max Porter were less under Ted Hughes’s wing, his striking verse novella, Grief is a Thing with Feathers, would properly have taken flight and soared

26 September 2015

8:00 AM

26 September 2015

8:00 AM

Grief is the Thing with Feathers Max Porter

Faber, pp.114, £10, ISBN: 9780571323760

A dead parent, the interrogation of a literary inheritance, and over everything, a bird: Max Porter is apparently unafraid to step into massive shoes. Not just the colossal ones belonging to Ted Hughes, whose ‘Crow’ poems are the jumping-off point for this free-verse novella about a bereaved Hughes scholar visited by Hughes’s corvine manifestation, but also those of Helen Macdonald.

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