Birthday Letters - Hardcover

Reviews

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.

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

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.