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.


The London Times (U.K.), Andrew Motion
The book comes like a thunderbolt from the blue. And reading it is like being hit by a thunderbolt. Its power is sometimes tender, sometimes funny, sometimes anguished, and always springing from a burning, continuous present. Anyone who thought Hughes's reticence was proof of his hard heart will immediately see how stony they have been themselves. This is a book written by someone obsessed, stricken and deeply loving. There is nothing like it in literature.


The Manchester Guardian (U.K.), Sarah Maguire
Grief takes time. Thirty-five years after the death of Sylvia Plath, her husband Ted Hughes has created the most stunning literary sensation I can remember with the publication of Birthday Letters, a sequence of 88 chronologically arranged poems provoked by their passionate, tempestuous marriage and by the after-shocks of Plath's suicide. These are poems of astonishing tragic power, a force intensified by their sudden appearance. Birthday Letters is a shock. Which is highly appropriate, given how full of shocks the book is... In the end, what is so shocking--and so moving--about Birthday Letters is the depth and range of its emotional openness. These are poems full of tenderness and anger, warmth and despair.


Slate, Christopher Benfey
The publication of Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters is the most sensational event I can think of in the recent history of English-language poetry.... Hughes's rough-hewn, four-square quatrains are themselves like well-built pieces of furniture; the scars, inherited and acquired, link the table to Hughes's own body.


From Booklist
Books of poetry virtually never make front-page headlines. This one did, in the Times of London and the New York Times. In it, Britain's poet laureate breaks his long silence about his marriage to American poet Sylvia Plath (1932^-63). Hughes was involved with another woman and separated from Plath at the time of her suicide. Assuming the worst, feminist ideologues have vilified and harassed him ever since. Meanwhile, he faithfully managed her literary legacy and raised their children. These 88 poems resound with love, grief, and shame over his inadequacy to deal with her chronic, severe depression. They follow the relationship from Hughes' possible glimpse of Plath before he actually met her, in a picture of Fulbright scholars, to well after her death, as when he imagines a big reunion in honor of her sixtieth birthday, at which "only you and I do not smile." Written mostly without rhyme or meter, they recall the couple's many travels and many moves to new quarters, but they are not merely factual reports. They often embark on journeys of imagery through her obsession and fear. She fixated on her father, who died when she was eight, but more on death. Daddy and death are competitors with Hughes for her love, and he is often left peering down a well, wandering in a labyrinth, scrabbling in a grave--always trying to save her from oblivion. He failed at that, but he has succeeded in artfully communicating the horrors that love is not powerful enough to overcome. Ray Olson

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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.

SYNOPSIS

With the surprise publication of Birthday Letters, Ted Hughes breaks his long-standing silence on the life and suicide of his first wife, Sylvia Plath. These 88 free-verse poems, written over a period of 25 years and addressed almost exclusively to Plath, trace the arc of Hughes and Plath's tempestuous relationship and provide a candid and intimate glimpse into one of the most famous literary marriages of this century.

FROM THE CRITICS

Michiko Kakutani - New York Times

Most of the poems in Birthday Letters have a wonderful immediacy and tenderness that's new to Mr. Hughes's writing, a tenderness that enables him to communicate Plath's terrors as palpably as her own verse, and to convey his own lasting sense of loss and grief.

Jones

"By the time of her death on 11 February, 1963, Sylvia Plath had written a large bulk of poetry," writes Ted Hughes in the introduction to Plath's The Collected Poems . You'd never know from reading that sentence that Hughes was Plath's husband, the father of her children; there isn't an inkling of feeling in those words. This is the fashion in which Hughes has chosen to treat Plath since her suicide 30-plus years ago: as an academic subject, not as an emotional one.

Maybe that's what makes Hughes's Birthday Letters such an immediate pleasure. Public catharsis is so essential these days that it's broadcast on TV; much of the entire world watched for the proper people to weep during Princess Diana's funeral last year. After Plath's suicide, Hughes refused to give the public the catharsis it demanded, choosing instead to write his typically icy introductions to new editions of his wife's work. But these 88 poems are proof that Hughes did indeed endure a catharsis, albeit privately. Birthday Letters reveals that Hughes, who died last fall at the age of 68, was very much human after all.

Hughes was himself to blame for the cold portrait he presented to the public. He chose to live in seclusion. He did not grant interviews. He appointed his sister, Olwyn Hughes, as gate-keeper to himself and to Plath's works (Ted Hughes controlled every word of Plath's oeuvre). Olwyn's legendary temperament hasn't helped matters, earning her the reputation of a Cerberus set to harry the heels of potential Plath biographers. It is also well known that while Plath was home with her gas cooker, Hughes was off with his mistress. Hughes-bashers also like to point out that Hughes allowed The Bell Jar to be published posthumously in the U.S. because he needed money to buy a third house. Total up these actions and one begins to understand why the followers of St. Sylvia the martyr have tried to scratch the Hughes name from Plath's headstone in Yorkshire on three separate occasions.

Luckily, the public has an insatiable appetite not only for catharsis but also for redemption (just consider the resurgence of televangelist Jimmy Swaggart and D.C. Mayor Marion Barry).

Hughes's reputation, for better or worse, is in the midst of being redeemed. In 1980 he was named Poet Laureate of England, a position he held until his death. After five biographies that have fingered Hughes as the bad guy, Janet Malcolm's The Silent Woman strives mightily to restore Hughes to a position of honor. Malcolm goes so far as to compare Hughes to Prometheus, "whose ravaged liver was daily reconstituted so it could be daily reravaged, Hughes [also] has had to watch his young self being picked over by biographers, scholars, critics, article writers, and newspaper journalists." And now, with the surprise publication of Birthday Letters , Hughes's redemption is nearly complete.

The 88 free-verse poems of this collection trace the arc of Hughes and Plath's tempestuous relationship. The book begins with a poem inspired by a photograph that Hughes had seen in a newspaper in 1956 of that year's Fulbright scholars. Plath was among those pictured. Hughes realizes the enormous strength in small moments. He remembers a night during their courtship when, arriving at Plath's window late at night, he throws clods of dirt at the panes, trying to wake her ("Aiming to find you, and missing, and again missing"). On their marriage day, it is Plath's gown that Hughes remembers -- the pink wool knitted dress -- in the poem of the same title.

In Birthday Letters , Hughes seems to make an effort to remove every trace of poetic convention from his verse. The poems aren't preoccupied with rhyme and meter but are rough on the surface. "Maybe I noticed you," he writes of his young self looking at that photograph of Fulbright scholars. "Maybe I weighed you up." You can see from these lines that Hughes isn't interested in prosody so much as he is in keeping the voice credible and getting the details right.

Plath fans can also bear witness to Hughes's unique perspective on many of her infamous preoccupations, including her father ("Til your real target / Hid behind me. Your Daddy / The god with the smoking gun") and her private fears ("The dark ate at you. And the fear of being crushed. A huge machine").

Still, other poems ironically fulfill our expectations about Hughes. In "Fate Playing," Hughes tells a story about an incident where Plath had come to meet him at a bus station. When Hughes doesn't arrive on the designated bus (he has taken a train instead), Plath goes into a frenzy, scrambling across London, searching for him. Isn't this what the reader expected all along? A portrait of Plath going berserk, contrasted with a calm Hughes, sitting comfortably on a train, both on an inevitable collision course? And when Hughes writes, "There I knew what it was/To be a miracle," after his reunion with an overjoyed Plath, the reader thinks, "Oh no." Despite the powerful frankness of Birthday Letters , and despite the glimpse readers have been allowed into the private life of one of the most famous literary marriages in history, we cannot forget that it is still Hughes who is in complete control.

--Scott C. Jones

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.

Library Journal - Barbara Hoffert

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 relationshipmost 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 encounterlike "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.

Library Journal - Barbara Hoffert