No patently sexual or scatological motifs are present in Ted Hughes's book, Moon-Whales, but the poems here suffer … from trying to be cutely hard-headed…. Hughes is often trying to write metrical, rhymed verse. The eeriness of the poems is that they are not even decent doggerel…. The scheme is sometimes to translate earthly lessons to another sphere and thereby make them more interesting and palatable as lessons. In Moon-Freaks, we find that when moon-people want to read, they look into a friend's face, "And thereupon / Each holds the other open and reads on." Moony-Art succinctly advises, "If you can't draw perfect / Better not draw. What you draw you get." But by and large Hughes is content to indulge in fantasy without much thought for the point of the analogy. The dracula vine is a moon-pet that transforms trash into fruit:

          So this is a useful pet
          And loyal...