Towards the end of this collection, Ted Hughes reads passages from an occasional diary which he kept while farming in Devon. He’d intended to mould his experiences into poems, but saw that their raw immediacy had its own value. So there he is, out on a winter’s night with an overgrown, asphyxiated lamb resolutely refusing to be born. No detail is spared: you listen with breathless, fascinated revulsion, and with a new respect for the exhausting travails of the shepherd – and indeed of the sheep.