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

11. See Sagar, The Art of Ted Hughes 243-44, for an overview of the collaboration. Sagar counts only eight illustrations to the 12 Hughes poems in round C, but there seem to be 10.

12. For a summary and analysis of the volume's alchemical background and quest, see Timothy Materer 141-55. He does not discuss the pictures or the collaboration. Nick Bishop, in exploring the possibility of psychological criticism based not on Jung or Freud but on Sufism and Gurdjieff, notes the relation of the "principle of alchemy" to the "'layered' compositional process" of Cave Birds (178).

13. The Ilkley Literature Festival is especially interesting in terms of the volume's composition. Baskin and Hughes had originally planned an edition of the poems to be published by Baskin's Gehenna Press, but then the Ilkley Literature Festival invited Hughes (for a commission, not an insignificant motive in modern collaborative production) to stage a presentation of the poems. According to Scigaj, Hughes reworked the poems of round B with the performative nature of the occasion in mind (Poetry of Ted Hughes 207). The verbal-visual relation of this version of Cave Birds (dramatic reading with projected images) was conceived within the conventions of the theater's composite art.

In addition to the limited edition of Cave Birds, the Scolar Press also published a broadside (a single folded sheet) of "The Interrogator" with Baskin's drawing and a facsimile of a draft of the poem (Sagar and Tabor 65).

14. In New Selected Poems (1982), selections from Cave Birds appear without accompanying images but with a foreword by Hughes outlining the collaboration with Baskin, briefly describing the missing images, and asserting their importance: "throughout the original sequence the interdependence between drawings and verses is quite close." In subsequent versions, reference to the images gradually shrinks, until in New Selected Poems 1957-1994 there are not only no images but no contextualizing notes of any kind.

15. The 10 poems are, followed by their titles in the trade edition where different: "The Knight," "The Baptist," "The Hall of Judgment" ("A flayed crow in the hall of judgment"), "The Gatekeeper," "A Loyal Mother" ("A green mother"), "Incomparable Marriage" ("A riddle"), "The Culprit" ("The scapegoat"), "The Guide," "Walking Bare," and "The Good Angel" ("The owl flower").

16. See McGann for a reading of the final lines of "The Circus Animals' Desertion" as an allusion to the commerce of the paper industry. Rag and bone shops, he explains, sold rags

      either to stationers or to the great paper merchants, who would
      reprocess them to make paper.... The immediate historical
      allusion is not to papermaking in general, but to printers and
      publishers who used a certain kind of paper (rag paper) and made
      a certain kind of book (fine-press printing). (5)