Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes

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.

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.

Summary
The past contemporary poet gives an account in 88 poems in letter form of hisromance and the life spent with Sylvia Plath.


Table of Poems

18 Rugby Street
55 Eltsley
The 59th Bear
9 Willow Street
The Afterbirth
Apprehensions
Astringency
The Badlands
The Beach
The Bee God
Being Christlike
The Bird
Black Coat
The Blackbird
Blood And Innocence
The Blue Flannel Suit
Brasilia
Caryatids: 1
Caryatids: 2
The Cast
Chaucer
Child's Park
The Chipmunk
Costly Speech
Daffodils
The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother
Drawing
A Dream
Dream Life
Dreamers
The Earthenware Head
Epiphany
Error
Fairy Tale
Fate Playing
Fever
Fidelity
Fingers
Fishing Bridge
Flounders
Freedom Of Speech
Fulbright Scholars
The God
God Help The Wolf After Whom The Dogs Do Not Bark
Grand Canyon
The Gypsy
The Hands
Horoscope
The Inscription
Isis
Karlsbad Caverns
Life After Death
The Literary Life
The Lodger
The Machine
The Minotaur
Moonwalk
Night-ride On Ariel
Ouija
The Owl
The Pan
Perfect Light
A Picture Of Otto
A Pink Wool Knitted Dress
Portraits
The Prism
The Rabbit Catcher
The Rag Rug
Red
Remission
Robbing Myself
Sam
Setebos
A Short Film
The Shot
St Botolph's
Stubbing Wharfe
Sutte
The Table
Telos
The Tender Place
Totem
Trophies
The Ventriloquist
Visit
Wuthering Heights
You Hated Spain
Your Paris

 

 

OxfordBooks.com and Dr. John Holleman, In Association With Amazon.com
Oxford, MS
 

 

 

 

Amazon.com is pleased to have Dr. John Holleman in the family of Amazon.com associates. We've agreed to ship products and provide customer service for orders we receive through special links on Dr. Holleman's online bookseller.
Amazon.com associates list selected books and music in an editorial context that helps you make the right choice. We encourage you to shop at Dr. Holleman's bookseller often to see what new items they've selected for you.
Thank you for shopping with an Amazon.com associate.
Sincerely,
Jeff Bezos, President Amazon.com