Lupercal was Ted Hughes’s second collection, containing some of his most brilliant animal poetry. It confirmed his reputation as a major talent in British poetry. In language that is by now utterly distinctive, the poems both describe and deliver a kind of psychic shock. Hughes’s singularity of vision provides a ready symbiosis between theme and subject — the brute survival instinct of ‘Hawk Roosting’ or ‘Pike’, for instance; the rapturous attention bestowed upon ‘An Otter’ or ‘The Bull Moses’; the pervasive legacy of human history that can be seen to saturate a Hughesian landscape.Lupercal is as vital and urgent today as it was when it was first published, its edict, implicit in every poem: to wake up, to pay attention.