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Birthday Letters: Poems, by Ted Hughes
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Formerly Poet Laureate to Queen Elizabeth II, the late Ted Hughes (1930-98) is recognized as one of the few contemporary poets whose work has mythic scope and power. And few episodes in postwar literature have the legendary stature of Hughes's romance with, and marriage to, the great American poet Sylvia Plath.
The poems in Birthday Letters are addressed (with just two exceptions) to Plath, and were written over a period of more than twenty-five years, the first a few years after her suicide in 1963. Some are love letters, others haunted recollections and ruminations. In them, Hughes recalls his and Plath's time together, drawing on the powerful imagery of his work--animal, vegetable, mythological--as well as on Plath's famous verse.
Countless books have discussed the subject of this intense relationship from a necessary distance, but this volume--at last--offers us Hughes's own account. Moreover, it is a truly remarkable collection of pems in its own right.
- Sales Rank: #104948 in Books
- Published on: 1999-03-30
- Released on: 1999-03-30
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.50" h x .48" w x 5.50" l, .57 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 208 pages
Amazon.com Review
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. 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's 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 pity of this superb collection. These poems require no prior knowledge--but for better or worse, we possess it.
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.
Most helpful customer reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Two Sides to Every Story
By Jeff Abell
For anyone who has spent much time with Sylvia Plath's work, the power of her own voice overwhelms any sense of objectivity about her subject matter. It's not accidental that she began to insist that the poems were best heard out loud, in her voice, because it is precisely the strength of her highly personal use of language that comes through so forcefully. This has seemingly left little room for debate, and many of those who have written about Plath's work have simply added a kind of cheer of support ("You go, girl!") to that voice. But there are two sides to every story, and Ted Hughes "Birthday Letters" is extremely moving in what it reveals about what it was like to live with a "genius" who also happened to have a history of mental breakdowns. At times, Hughes poems closely reference Plath's, often to very telling effect. For example, Plath's poem "The Rabbit Catcher," which describes her sense of identification with the hunted, and has her pulling up rabbit traps that she finds, protecting the poor bunnies from the evil hunters. Hughes remembers that day differently, watching his wife screaming, as she ripped up the wire traps that provided a little free nourishment to local poor farmers, undoing what to him was generations of history. Until the publication of this book, we've only had Plath's take on the events of her marriage, and these poems provide a much needed sense of how very difficult it must have been living with someone as internally tortured and emotionally volatile as Plath. A few of Hughes' poems are a little bit over the top (especially "The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother"), but the defensiveness is very much in the background. One senses instead how emotionally charred Hughes has been since Plath's suicide, how he has continued to reflect on the details of their relationship, searching for answers to the inevitable question of why that accompanies any self-inflicted death. A good counter-balance to Hughes' poems is the book "The Silent Woman," which outlines the history of how Hughes and his sister Olwyn have handled the Plath estate; you'll better understand why some feminist critics think these poems are too little too late. For the average lover of poetry, however, you'll be grateful for the insights Hughes provides, and you'll also be moved by the beauty of his language. After all, apparently a major part of Plath's attraction to him was that he was such a good poet.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
and she enjoyed it.
By Samantha Adkins
This was a present for my daughter, and she enjoyed it.
1 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
a personal testament, for better or worse
By S. Park
Some time ago the popularity of this tome was criticized as being fueled by "the Oprah factor" more than genuine literary interest. But after all, poetry is at its most powerful when the reader can identify with the speaker, and it is probably for the better that we possess the knowledge that makes it possible regarding this collection. Hughes may have been cruel towards Plath, but that is not for us to judge. What is indisputable is that Hughes has retched out every word in terrible agony. It is a heartbreaking testament.
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