Ted Hughes published this sequence in 1970, three years after Sylvia Plath's death, though he had been working on the Crow mythology for years. The poems are brutal, primitive, often funny in the blackest possible way. Crow survives everything: creation, crucifixion, nuclear war. Hughes strips language down to its Anglo-Saxon bones. The book divided critics, but its influence on British poetry was seismic. This is mythology written from the perspective of the scavenger, the survivor, the creature who laughs at the ruins.