Porter’s winged friend rings true to its archetypical crowish nature: vibrant, intelligent, playful, a mythical trickster. To determine whether both crowish characters are idiosyncratic or not, the original Crow poetry should be read, which I didn’t. As grief is raw, dirty, scary and exhausting – certainly rather a crow than a sweet little bird of hope - the image of the omnipresent Crow embodying grief is excellent and powerful, but it is Hughes’s creature after all, not Porter’s. He claims to be a sentimental bird, thriving on sorrow, eating it. The Crow character, associated with numerous myths about death and dying, like the raven symbolizing death itself in some cultures, curiously brings life instead of death, epitomizing grief and sadness as an incontrovertible part of life. While the father tries to continue working after the death of his wife, writing a book about Ted Hughes ‘s Crow, ‘Crow on the Couch, a wild analysis’, Crow enters, promising (or threatening?) to stay as long as the father and the 2 young boys need him.

Strange enough, both times Ted Hughes (1930-1998) crossed my path, the first time with Birthday letters, published a few months after my first spouse’s death, and now again with Max Porter’s novella, exuding Ted Hughes from every pore. A glance on the explicit cover art however leaves no room for dulcet misunderstanding: the ‘thing with feathers’ isn’t a tender still-downy birdie, but a lugubrious black bird – It is Ted Hughes’s sinister Crow, resuscitated in this fable-like tale about coping with the sudden death of a spouse and mother.ĭo we find books or do books find us? Having experienced the death of a spouse twice – a brutal, sudden one and one following a long illness, going through a childless mourning and one together with two children now, this novella focussing on the grieving process of a father and his 2 young sons came to find me.

I picked this up because the title struck me like a poem in itself, sounding like an titillating modulation on that wonderful poem Hope is the thing with feathers by Emily Dickinson I am intrigued by the technique of altering variations on a theme, like in music, and keen on searching for changes in harmony, rhythm, melody, or orchestration.

You Cannot Prevent the Birds of Sorrow from Flying over Your Head, but You Can Prevent Them from Building a Nest in Your Hair

Grief is the thing with feathers pages