Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #199599 in Books
• Published on: 1999-03-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Amazon.com
Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters--88 tantalizing responses to Sylvia Plath and the furies she left behind--emerge from an echo chamber of art and memory, rage and representation. In the decades following his wife's 1963 suicide, Hughes kept silent, a stance many have seen as guilty, few as dignified. While an industry grew out of Plath's life and art, and even her afterlife, he continued to compose his own dark, unconfessional verses, and edited her Collected Poems, Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963, and Journals. But Hughes's conservancy (and his sister Olwyn's power as Plath's executrix) laid him open to yet more blame. Biographers and critics found his cuts to her letters self-interested, and decried his destruction of the journals of her final years--undertaken, he insisted, for the sake of their children.

In Birthday Letters we now have Hughes's response to Plath's white-hot mythologizing. Lost happiness intensifies present pain, but so does old despair: "Your ghost," he acknowledges, "inseparable from my shadow." Ranging from accessible short-story-like verses to tightly wound, allusive lyrics, the poems push forward from initial encounters to key moments long after Plath's death. In "Visit," he writes, "I look up--as if to meet your voice / With all its urgent future / that has burst in on me. Then look back / At the book of the printed words. / You are ten years dead. It is only a story. / Your story. My story." These poems are filled with conditionals and might-have-beens, Hughes never letting us forget forces in motion before their seven-year marriage and final separation. When he first sees Plath, she is both scarred (from her earlier suicide attempt) and radiant: "Your eyes / Squeezed in your face, a crush of diamonds, / Incredibly bright, bright as a crush of tears..." But Fate and Plath's father, Otto, will not let them be. In the very next poem, "The Shot," her trajectory is already plotted. Though Hughes is her victim, her real target is her dead father--"the god with the smoking gun."

Of course, "The Shot" and the accusatory "The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother" are an incitement to those who side (as if there is a side!) with Plath. Newsweek has already chalked up the reaction of poet and feminist Robin Morgan to the book: "My teeth began to grind uncontrollably." But Hughes makes it clear that his poems are written for his dead wife and living children, not her acolytes' bloodsport. He has also, of course, written them for himself and the reader. Pieces such as "Epiphany," "The 59th Bear," and "Life After Death" are masterful mixes of memory and image. In "Epiphany," for instance, the young Hughes, walking in London, suddenly spots a man carrying a fox inside his jacket. Offered the cub for a pound, he hesitates, knowing he and Plath couldn't handle the animal--not with a new baby, not in the city. But in an instant, his potent vision extends beyond the animal, perhaps to his and Plath's children:

Already past the kittenish
But the eyes still small,
Round, orphaned-looking, woebegone
As if with weeping. Bereft
Of the blue milk, the toys of feather and fur,
The den life's happy dark. And the huge whisper
Of the constellations
Out of which Mother had always returned.

From Publishers Weekly
Kept under tight wraps by the terms attached to a high-priced serialization in the London Times as well as by Hughes's notorious secrecy, the British Poet Laureate's collection of verse-letters to Sylvia Plath is already being heralded as one of the century's literary landmarks. The legend that has grown up around Plath, her poems, her life with Hughes and her suicide in 1963 has been tended by several generations of devoted scholars and readers, and made all the more insurmountable by Hughes's silence on anything relating to Plath other than her work. It is thus astonishing to have this near-narrative of the entire span of their relationship, from Hughes's first glimpse of Plath in a photo of arriving Fulbright scholars, to Hughes's anguish, until now an emotion not widely credited to him, since her death. At once the record of a Yorkshireman's collision with America and American-ness ("You stayed/ Alien to me as a window model,/ American, airport-hopping superproduct") and of a baffled husband's jealousy and despair at his wife's obsessive pursuit of her dead father, the poems arc through the poet's struggles?and joy?with the facts of his younger self's married life. Even tender recollections, such as Plath reciting Chaucer to a field of cows, are tinged with foreboding or, elsewhere, with the intensity of their writing lives: "The poems, like smoking entrails,/ Came soft into your hands." Throughout, Hughes's muscular, controlled free verse, familiar from his previous collections and recent Tales from Ovid, is well suited to the task of wrestling his memory of Plath back to earth, vividly rendering their past while allowing space for a present reckoning. Hughes's occasional snipes at the Plath faithful ("And now your peanut-crunchers can stare/ At the ink stains.../ Where you engraved your letters...") may lead some to accuse him of an elaborate attempt at revisionism, at remaking Plath in his own image. But the strength of the poems simply renders the charge moot, compelling us to accept this masterwork's sincerity, depth of feeling and force of language.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
A distinguished poet, essayist, and translator who serves as poet laureate of England, Hughes is probably still best known as the husband of Sylvia Plath. Since her suicide in 1963, he has resolutely refused to speak about her, and he has been accused of abandoning her and driving her to her death. Now, for the first time, he discusses their relationship?most appropriately in verse. Though he describes himself and Plath as "Siamese-twinned, each of us festering/ a soul-sepsis for the other," this is not a book of wrenching revelations or vigorously mounted defense; it is, rather, a painful and painstaking exploration of just what went wrong in the poets' relationship 35 years ago. In his sometimes deceptively accessible verse, Hughes moves from initial encounter?like "the first fresh peach I ever tasted"?through courtship, marriage, death, and regret ("Who will remember your fingers?/ Their winged life"); throughout, these aptly named "letters"?written mostly in the second-person to Plath?are filled with foreboding. In the end, Hughes comes across as neither victimizer nor victim but as an ordinary human being too dazed?or too dense??to recognize the lightning bolt that passed through his life. Essential for all literary collections.?Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

DOESN'T HOLD A CANDLE TO HIS WIFE, SYLVIA
Somehow, I expected introspection, character, and depth. I truly do not know why I did. Sylvia Plath was brilliant, but this is not about her genius. Her former husband, Ted, came along for the ride, representing a millstone about her neck, and found publication simply by association. Were it not for her, we would know nothing of this man and his jaunty verse.

Nothing about his poetry flows as Sylvia's did, and one would think he would have gleaned something from her, yet he failed. Is strange how one can live and love a person, yet not be influenced or inspired. In his case, it is as if she never existed.

While this is not a pity-missive about Sylvia, I would find it impossible not to be shaped by the opportunity to have known someone so utterly in touch with themselves and their art form. How he can remain unaffected in his work is beyond me.

In having read the memoir of Jillian Becker, "Giving Up, The Last Days of Sylvia Plath," there is noticeable resent and hatred on the part of Ted Hughes when he arrives at Sylvia's funeral. It seems obvious he felt more "polished" in his art than his wife, yet her pain spilled like liquid on paper and reached thousands of people. One can study language theory eternally, as Ted did, but if native talent is not present, nothing worthy can come about.

Ted Hughes is a jumble of meaningless words strung together. Sylvia Plath exposes her very soul and resonates, still, with the darkest days we have all experienced in our lives.

Sylvia Plath IS poetry, and, no, it need not rhyme.

Ted Hughes is not worth the paper he is printed upon.

Talking to a ghost
British poet laureate Ted Hughes (1930-1998) was married to American poet, author, and feminist icon Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide in 1963.

On one hand suicide is shabby and unfair because the people left behind are made to suffer unjustly. On the other hand, who can judge when someone has reached their limit, when enough is enough and life has lost all its meaning and flavor? These birthday letters are by someone left behind.

Much to his credit, Ted Hughes does not judge his wife's act. He never asks her why she did it, he simply accepts without remonstration that she chose to end her days. He stands accused by many of Plath's fans has having driven her to this, and his poems show he does accept a share of the blame for the suffering he caused her. The collection shows his suffering, and Hughes' perception of hers.

For her suicide to have caused such pain in him, the bond between Plath and Hughes must have been strong and true. We find many intimate stories in these letters as well, as when Hughes describes his American trips in Yellowstone Park or on some beach picking up a horseshoe crab.

The poems are written in the first and second person, with all save two addressed to Plath. They are all in Hughes' own voice, resonating like an internal monologue, but with no one to answer his words. Hughes is talking to a ghost.

Vincent Poirier, Dublin

Read if you love Sylvia
I have grown up reading Sylvia Plath, recently read the biography of Assia Wevill (the mistress), and have vilified Ted Hughes mentally for years... But now I have read these poems, and I can see now that there are realms of the heart that the eye never sees, and we will never be able to judge the past of two other souls. These poems are wonderful, and it is pleasing to see that I enjoy Hughe's poetry as much or more than Plath's. Read these and Hughe's other works before you rush to judgement, they are truly works to be recognized.