Reading word, image, and the body of the book: Ted Hughes and Leonard Baskin's Cave Birds

The poems and pictures of Cave Birds are, often wittily, interactive. In none of its textual incarnations does Cave Birds attempt a seamless verbal-visual textuality, for all that Blake's composite pages may lie behind the endeavor. Throughout, word and image occupy their own space. What interests Baskin and Hughes is relation across difference: words and images orbit each other, held in active tension, exchanging across the gap.

The poems are playfully aware of themselves as poems on images. "A blot has knocked me down," for example, describes the black oval, interpreted in the poem as an egg, in which Baskin's flayed crow is encased (fig. 11). "Or am I under attention?" he asks, which, of course, he is--from us and from Hughes. Hughes puns on the image: the crow calls what is at the center of the oval/egg "This yoke of afterlife." Light and darkness in the poems are deployed with their conventional associations of knowledge and ignorance but refer, of course, also to the black and white of the drawings. On one level these are, with a few dabs of color here and there, the colors of the afterworld presented in the poems as well, so that chromatically poem and picture together present an image of the afterlife. On another level the poems thematize looking, playing on the convention of sight as a way to knowledge. The necessary preparation for revelation is for the hero, as for other spiritual questers, a stripping bare of the self, until, in Hughes's version, "Nothing remains of the warrior but his weapons // And his gaze." "His eyes darken bolder in their vigil" we're told, "As the chapel crumbles" ("The Knight"). In "The Hall of Judgment," "Darkness," the state in which sight cannot happen, is the condition of "nothingness," the opposite of revelation. The compositional process of the poems themselves begins with looking; ekphrasis takes off from the knowledge attained by observation. While the reader cannot be said to become the quester of the narrative, in the difficult act of reading the limited-edition Cave Birds, he or she lives some of its confused searching.

[FIGURE 11 OMITTED]

The trade edition

If the limited edition emphasizes fragmentation and reading as decomposition, the trade edition, binding word and image face to face in a codex volume, emphasizes reunion. The fullest elaboration of Cave Birds, the 1978-79 trade edition, contains all of the poems and drawings produced, except one each from rounds A and C. The poems and pictures are arranged narratively, not in order of composition. The three rounds are blended, ekphrasis and illustration interspersed throughout the volume, further complicating the shifts in relations suggested in the limited edition. With the exception of the first poem, which is not accompanied by a picture (more on this below), poems and pictures are paired, poem on the left, picture on the right. Bound on the short side, 28.25 cm X 22.5 cm, smaller than a coffee-table picture book but larger than the usual volume of poems, this book is a hybrid like the image-text itself and like the bird-humans of Baskin's drawings.