Originally published in 1957, Hawk in the Rain was the first collection of poems by Ted Hughes. The book won the New York Poetry Center First Publication Award, for which the judges were W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Marianne Moore; it also won the Somerset Maugham Award. Indeed, Hawk in the Rain was acclaimed by every reviewer from A. Alvarez to Edwin Muir, and in its pages we can still see the promising brilliance of one of the most important English-speaking poets of the modern age.