Product Description

With just two exceptions, these 88 poems, in the form of a narrative, are addressed to Sylvia Plath, the American poet to whom Ted Hughes was married. They were written over a period of more than 25 years, the first a few years after her suicide in 1963. Intimate and candid, they cover the whole period of their relationship, from the first meeting to the aftermath of Plath's death, but are largely concerned with the psychological drama that led to the writing of her finest poems and to her death.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9987 in Books
• Published on: 1999-04-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters--88 tantalising 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 suicide in 1963, 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' 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 mythologising. 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 the 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.

Other poems are more influenced by Plath's "terrible, hypersensitive fingers", including "The Bee God" and "Dreamers", which is apparently a record of Plath's one encounter with Hughes' mistress: "She fascinated you. Her eyes caressed you, / Melted a weeping glitter at you. / Her German the dark undercurrent / In her Kensington jeweller's elocution / Was your ancestral Black Forest whisper--". This exotic woman, "slightly filthy with erotic mystery", seems a close relation to Plath's own Lady Lazarus and the poem would be equally powerful without any biographical information. This is the one, paradoxical, regret about this superb collection--these poems require no prior knowledge, but, for better or worse, we possess it. --Kerry Fried

Customer Reviews

Beautiful and haunting
Originally a fan of Sylvia Plath I decided to purhase this to get Hughes' own perspective of their marriage. I was not disappointed. A beautiful and touching read each poem maps out a different scene from their lives together and really brings it to life. It clearly shows the beautiful and deep love Hughes truly held for his wife and how much he still felt about her right up until his own death many years later. It is clear from his poignant poetry why he was given the title of Poet Laureate and this work is a credit to his name. I would recommend this to anyone.

Sad, disturbing but brilliant
Birthday letters is a book which is haunting. Ted Hughes's mind is exposed in way which makes every human being, who reads these poems, relate to the mental torment and anguish he has endured over the subsequent period of 25 years in which Birthday Letters was composed. When I read birthday letters I felt as though I was intruding into personal moments in Hughes's life. The book of course is very onesided but it shows the fundamental nature of human beings and how we change our innermost feelings such as guilt, which torment us, into that of anger and even hate so that we can cope with our minds and memories which we can not escape.

She's Dead, He's Dead, What's there to Say.
ANSWER: Everything. This book is tremendous. Not just because it is an excellent piece of literature, but because Hughes manages to do something of the impossible. He takes in it two iconic figures and reduces them to what they really were: ordinary people having ordinary problems. Before you read this book you can only see these two people as oversized monumental, almost untouchable, figures. When you have finished reading the collection you see them as a young couple who are afraid of bears attacking them in their tent. It is such an evocative personal account of two young ambitious souls as they bootleg around Europe and America searching for writers that exists in, and embrace, their poetic minds. You see the relationship as it blooms and dwindles so fast. The ecstatic beginnings, the honey-moon period, and then melancholic home coming and the realties of having to find places to live and work to do. Eventually the demise, lazy, sad, excepting the end rather than fighting it. Acutely poignant. A must read.