Reading Challenge Reviews: Poems and Plays

We're back to the river for this set of reviews in our Reading Challenge. We're also branching beyond the usual genres, and finding ourselves in poetry and plays. Brenda has found a book of poetry by the late Ted Hughes with a rather appropriate title, and Sharon went back to the same river she visited earlier, to hang out with the same characters.

Brenda Carter read River: Poems by Ted Hughes; Photographs by Peter Keen
          Buds fur-gloved with frost. Everything had come to a standstill
In a brand new stillness.
The river-trees, in a blue haze,
Were fractured domes of spun ghost.
Wheel-ruts frost-fixed. Mid-morning, slowly
The sun pushed dark spokes of melt and sparkle
Across the fields of hoar. And the river steamed -
Flint-olive.
(‘The Morning Before Christmas’, Stanza 1, p. 8)

Ah, end of exams. Time to read, time to slow down and savour exquisite imagery in a book of poems such as Ted Hughes’ anthology, River.

First published in 1983, River follows a series of rivers through the course of a year, interwoven with references to the lifecycle of salmon. Hughes’ environmental activism and love of fishing is evident in his poems. While the majority of poems find inspiration in Hughes’ English heritage, Japanese, Celtic and even Alaskan waterways feature in others.

Each poem is accompanied by a full-page photograph by Hughes’ fellow angler, Peter Keen. His images capture the beauty, activity and wildlife alluded to in the poems. As well as enhancing the reader’s experience and understanding of the poems, they are a delight to examine in their own right.

River is a wonderful coffee table book to dip into over the holidays, and a refreshing alternative to academic reading.

Non-Fiction, 820 HUG(T) 1B RIV


Sharon Bryan read Toad of Toad Hall, by A. A. Milne.

If you read my review of Wind in the Willows in the last Reading Challenge post, you possibly guessed that I was going to review this play for this post. I did, after all, state that I’d take any excuse to revisit either the Willows or anything written by A. A. Milne – so of course, Milne’s version of Grahame’s story was always going to be on the cards.

Getting one of the most popular playwrights and writers of children’s stories to adapt one of the most popular children’s books of recent years for the stage was, of course, a brilliant decision and should be roundly applauded. Milne has a deft touch with writing for the stage, and he managed to take characters that were already beloved and add a little extra sparkle to them.

In adapting the book, one of the first things he did (and I mean “first” quite literally) was add some female characters (in addition to the two bit players Grahame allowed in his book). The play begins with a young girl talking to her nurse as she begins to imagine the hijinks of the creatures who live by the river. Later in the play, we also get to see two rabbits who are female for approximately 20 seconds. It’s not much, but it’s something.

Like most plays, it’s an enjoyable enough read if you like reading plays (and I do), but I’d love to see it performed one day. You always get the feeling it would be twice as good live as it is on the page.


Fiction, c820MIL

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