Birthday Letters

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 208 pages
• Published by: Faber Faber January 2, 2002
• ISBN 10 Number: 0571194737
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0571194735
• Book Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.1 x 0.7 inches
• Weighs: 8.5 ounces

Product 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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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 amazing 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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Reader Reviews
This review is from: Birthday Letters: Poems (Paperback) Step back for a moment, if you can, from the fathomless controversies and recriminations regarding Plath and Hughes. Ignore the value of this book as "news" (it will soon be old news). Even ignore its frankness and candor, which even its detractors must admit. Then ask yourself this question: is anything left of this book, and if so, what is it? Frankly, what one might then dimly perceive is a weird monument on the English horizen . . . something like Stonehenge. So is this final grave marker to the era of the confessional poets a piece of natural history of our age? Or is it not natural but fake -- like the fake ruins wealthy Britishers used to construct on their properties a couple hundred years ago, to experience appropriate melancholy moods? No, I do not know, either. But these are the sort of questions we ought to be asking. Leave the Plath-Hughes cosmic prize fight for the funny papers. Hughes was a great nature poet, capable of profound meditations and metaphors concerning the natural world. If this book makes any sense other than as autobigraphy it must somehow be seen in the context of that sensibility. What I see here are a lot of spectacular emotions and fireworks, but finally a throwing up of his hands. Did nature finally just cast something way too big upon his shore? This certainly seems the case in at least some sense -- a sort of confession implicit between the lines here, too. Plath was too much for him, finally. She may damn well have been too much for anybody, but the jury will have to remain out on that for awhile. At least Hughes finally offered his testimony; for that we should be grateful, although a realistic appraisal of Plath will have to take into account many voices. One senses that will take a long time, not necessarily a bad thing. The poems here are a little prosey at times, but what is gained is a great sense of freedom and relief. It makes room for some truth, anyway -- the vivid first impressions, the spooky playing with magic and things much too big and dangerous for play. You will never forget the sad little marks of the electro-shock treatments on her temples; yes, this is a statement of love and empathy, of the deepest sort, though some will stubbornly refuse to acknowledge it. But never stop (as reader) asking whether the emotions observed in Plath, and the emotions supposedly felt by Hughes (even that empathy--for all is on the table in the game these two played), are real or contrived for the hungry literary market. You and I are part of that market and shaped by the same tastes, conditioned by similar desires as our two duelling poets -- duelling now forever, much like the twin damned in Dante's Inferno. And we like it too -- as Martin Scorcese keenly once observed, no one ever really escapes his times. All said, this Plath-Hughes business is obviously quite close to the molten core of our own era. This book, then, is very important as a document, an important piece of the puzzle to anyone concerned about who we are. But the answers are for a long way away -- the book is very worthwhile but requires great openness to any number of possibilities, long meditation and a willingness to alter fundamental assumptions past and present.