Suggestions on how to read the "Crow" poems

In an interview Hughes states: 

The first idea of Crow was really an idea of style.... The idea
was originally just to write his songs, the songs that a Crow
would sing. In other words, songs with no music whatsoever,
in a super-simple and a super-ugly language which would in a
way shed everything except just what he wanted to say
without any other consideration and that's the basis of the
style of the whole thing.

Hughes describes Crow's adventures thus: 

Having been created, he's put through various adventures
and disasters and trials and ordeals, and the effect of these
is to alter him not at all, then alter him a great deal,
completely transform him, tear him to bits, put him together
again, and produce him a little bit changed. And maybe his
ambition is to become a man, which he never quite manages.
(Ted Hughes's Crow) [The Listener (30 July 1970

A. Alvarez's comment, chosen for the blurb on the book's cover, is in an
inadvertent way close to the bone of Crow: Each fresh encounter with
despair becomes the occasion for a separate, almost funny, story in
which natural forces and creatures, mythic figures, even parts of the
body, act out their special roles. That is, the poems function as so
many attempts to get a potentially debilitating encounter with despair
back on the Symbolic move

Crow, Hughes says, is created by God's nightmare's attempt to improve
on man. And for sure he is an improvement, if adaptation to environment
is the main criterion in such judgments, and if the world is in fact as
burned out as it most often appears in these poems. He is an
improvement because he sides with nature, identifying with those forces
in the universe that, since midcentury, we need never hope again to
tame or even understand. Hughes's development has led to a point where
the acceptance of pain in a painful universe becomes an increasingly
significant obligation. But whereas in the earlier poetry pain was part of a
humanly understood order, in Crow the sense of human order and human
feeling has atrophied; and the fulgurations of its aftershine illuminate only
a barren scenario in which pain, abundant enough, is without a context
and not to be understood, a desert which no nightingale fills with
inviolable voice. The formlessness of most of the verse may be attributed
to the loss of faith in the efficacy of the human power of order: Crow
responds to the pain of an amoral universe with raucous laughter; Hughes
flicks in the controls of traditional poetic diction, form, logical
contextimpositions appropriate only to a world tamed to human
proportions. He rules out tensions and forfeits opportunities for any other
tone than that of flat, straightforward description. (A.K. Weatherhead, "Ted Hughes, 'Crow,' and Pain," in Texas Quarterly, Vol. XIX, No.3 Autumn, 1976, pp. 95-108.)