What is the Truth? A Farmyard Fable for the Young.

First edition. Oblong 4to. 127pp. Publisher's brown cloth, stamped in gilt on a dark brown inset to spine; tan endpapers. Frontispiece and b/w illustrations by R.J. Lloyd, many full-page.

Signed by Hughes and Lloyd to the half-title page. Presentation copy from the artist (Sept. '84) to Ann [Skea], the Hughes scholar and author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (1994).

Winner of the 1985 Guardian Children's Fiction Prize and the Signal Poetry Award. Dedicated to Clare and Michael [Morpurgo], Hughes's friends and Devon farming neighbours who had suggested the project to him, in aid of their charity, Farms for City Children. The author was to become its first President.

Written in a mixture of prose and poetry, this 'farmyard fable for the young' follows the spirits of a sleeping "Farmer, his Wife and Son, the Vicar, the Poacher, and the Shepherd," as they describe the surrounding fauna. Each superimposes their version of the truth onto an animal, as refracted through their own experience, and therefore but partial. The authentic truth, as revealed in God's Word by the book's end, is the Blakean truth that every living creature is holy: "I am each of these things... And each of these things is me".

In an introduction to a retrospective exhibition of the artist's work at the Hereford City Museum and Art Gallery in 1996, Hughes drew out the parallels between his vision and Lloyd's illustrations: "These were black and white drawings, but... one way or another, he has made each of these creatures a sacred figure".

"[A] very beautiful book: God and his son go to visit mankind and ask a few simple questions... the poems are pure enchantment." –The School Librarian

[Sagar & Tabor A87a.1; Letters of Ted Hughes, ed. Christopher Reid (London: Faber & Faber, 2007)]