Passports for the Journey to the Mad Dam is an uncompromising and startling selection of poems gleaned from almost a decade of Hughes' early output.
Acting as an excavation into restlessness, the poems seem to inhabit a menagerie of vivid daydreams, where life seems fleeting and permanent. As much as the writing is tender in outlook, the poems are equally colloquially savage. The identities and perspectives explored are brave and innocent, forgotten and fearsome, all bearing witness to themes of sex, death, and childhood.
The poet has an eye for the tawdry, an ear for the subtle and brutal, and a heart and soul that brings joy to the mythical, far side of despair, but perhaps his most redeeming quality is that his candour picks over the old bones of poetry so that boundaries, real or imagined, surreal or symbolic, are continuously transgressed.