Review
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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 (
/exec/obidos/ASIN/0571201156/%24%7B0%7D ), 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 red (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 e and
Plath's her, Otto, will not let them be. In the very next
poem, "The ", her trajectory is already plotted. Though
Hughes is her victim, her real target is her dead her--"the
god with the smoking ."
Of course, "The " 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
Review
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"An extraordinary book . . . [Hughes's] subject is
Plath herself--how she looked and moved and talked, her
pleasures, rages, uncanny dreams, and many terrors, what was good
between them and where it went wrong."—A. Alvarez, "The New
Yorker"
"The critics who are urging us to regard these poems as
masterpieces are right. Their intensity of feeling, the clarity
of their imagery, the precision, energy, simplicity, and fluidity
of their language are still striking."—Paul Levy, "The Wall
Street Journal"
"An emotional, direct, regretful, and entranced [tone] pervades
the book's strongest poems, which are quiet and thoughtful and
conversational."—Katha Pollitt, "The New York Times Book Review"
"Most of the poems in "Birthday Letters" have a wonderful
immediacy and tenderness that's new to 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. . . . They sho