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... more
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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...
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
Ariel's Gift, an extensive commentary on Ted Hughes' acclaimed Birthday Letters, published in the last year of his life in 1998. Exploring the powerful image of the destructive, and poetic, couple through the life and writing of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, Wagner situates Birthday Letters as a type of conversation: Hughes' engagement with the legacy of his wife's poetry as well as her suicide, his "return" to Plath's writing--her titles, words, phrases haunting his--as well as the drama of her life.In this sense, Ariel's Gift is suspended between two traditions of reading, tracing both the literary dialogue between poets and poems and the life--the biographical, and personal, incident--that goes into the writing. Responding to the lure of Plath's intense, even selfless, exposé of self in her writing, as well as to what was felt to be Hughes's breaking of his 30-year silence about their relationship, Wagner provides a chronological account of the relationship between the two poets--an account which then frames her readings of the poems included in Birthday Letters. This is not, however, an attempt to reduce lyric poetry to personal experience. Wagner's reading is always alert to the ways in which Hughes is (re)working Plath's poetry and sensitive to fact that the "memory of Sylvia Plath, and her legacy, does not belong solely to Hughes". Read as a dialogue not only with Plath but with the broader cultural controversy which surrounds his relationship to Plath's work, Wagner explores the complex texture of Birthday Letters as Hughes's final tribute to a unique poetry. --Vicky Lebeau
Ariel's Gift, an extensive commentary on Ted Hughes' acclaimed Birthday Letters, published in the last year of his life in 1998. Exploring the powerful image of the destructive, and poetic, couple through the life and writing of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, Wagner situates Birthday Letters as a type of conversation: Hughes' engagement with the legacy of his wife's poetry as well as her suicide, his return to Plath's writing--her titles, words, phrases haunting his--as well as the drama of her life.In this sense, Ariel's Gift is suspended between two traditions of reading, tracing both the literary dialogue between poets and poems and the life--the biographical, and personal, incident--that goes into the writing. Responding to the lure of Plath's intense, even selfless, exposé of self in her writing, as well as to what was felt to be Hughes's breaking of his 30-year silence about their relationship, Wagner provides a chronological account of the relationship between the two poets--an account which then frames her readings of the poems included in Birthday Letters. This is not, however, an attempt to reduce lyric poetry to personal experience. Wagner's reading is always alert to the ways in which Hughes is (re)working Plath's poetry and sensitive to fact that the memory of Sylvia Plath, and her legacy, does not belong solely to Hughes. Read as a dialogue not only with Plath but with the broader cultural controversy which surrounds his relationship to Plath's work, Wagner explores the complex texture of Birthday Letters as Hughes's final tribute to a unique poetry. --Vicky Lebeau
Advantages: It will make you believe in love. Disadvantages: You may feel you are prying.
Ted Hughes was always reticent about his marraige to Sylvia Plath and it seems beautifully appropriate that he should finally choose to talk about it in poetry. The poetry itself is polished, moving and thought-provoking but I suspect the real interest lies in its subject matter and you may find yourself trying to match poems to known biographical details. At times, indeed, you may feel that you are prying, and it is,of course, a very one sided account ...
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Advantages: Ted Hughes at his best Disadvantages: May need to read some of the poems over and over
Whether or not you are a fan of the late former Poet Laureate,it has to be said that he was a master of style and linguistic technique.The poems in this collection are,of course,addressed directly to his late wife,the American poet Sylvia Plath,and were written in the years after her suicide.They are intense,vivid,emotional and often quite disturbing.I cannot pretend that they are easy poems to understand,and you wouldn't want to read them all at ...
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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.
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