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Ted Hughes is Britain's reigning poet laureate, and he confesses that most of his short fiction is merely "an accompaniment to my poems." But there are many gems here, including the affecting trilogy portraying the poet's South Yorkshire childhood. The finest tale in this collection may be "The Wound," actually a radio play about a dying soldier trekking across a pitiless desert. The death-march transforms itself into an allegory of the Buddhist path from death to rebirth. Most of these short stories date from the 1950s and 60s, before Hughes became a famous poet. [via]