Birthday Letters

by Ted Hughes

Price-clipped dustjacket, otherwise this book is clean and bright, with no creases, no tears, and no markings.

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Nonfiction, Biography, Memoir, British Literature, 20th Century

198 pages, Hardcover

First published January 10, 1998

About the author

Edward James Hughes was an English poet, translator, and children's writer. Critics frequently rank him as one of the best poets of his generation and one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1984 and held the office until his death. In 2008, The Times ranked Hughes fourth on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
He married fellow poet Sylvia Plath in 1956, and they lived together in the United States and then in England, in a tumultuous relationship. They had two children before separating in 1962 and Plath ended her own life in 1963.

Reviews

[Jamie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I need to get something off my chest with this one. I'd read Birthday Letters a few years ago, I guess when I was first getting into Plath and was not particularly interested in the warzone of the Plath/Hughes legacy. I also didn't really give much thought to poetry at the time--if it was pretty or vaguely shocking, I'd nod and think, 'Well, look how smart I am, for reading this.' So I think I let Hughes off the hook last time--and I should clarify to say that I don't hate Hughes' poetry; I'm not familiar with a large body of it, but I can safely say, having given them a shot on several occasions, that I love "The Thought-Fox," "Wodwo," "Pike," and a handful of others, including a few from the Crow sequence, though I can't recall the titles at the moment. And I'm hoping to read more of his work--The Hawk in Rain and Crow are both on my list for this year.

However, getting through this book this time was a bit of an ordeal. I am genuinely troubled by the violations on display in this text. Yes, I know Hughes wrote them (originally) without the intent of publishing them; I know this was his last book; I know the critics fawned over it (Kakutani says something about it 'clearly coming from a poet's core' or some sentimental shite like that). And I know this is one subjective stance on the Plath/Hughes relationship--from the perspective of one player, in contrast to the many horror tales we've heard of Hughes over the years. I don't think Hughes is some villain--both he and Plath seem similarly awful at moments, and similarly inspired and loving at others, by all accounts. But the portrait painted in this text is one that has a somewhat disturbing undercurrent--Hughes refers to himself almost obsessively as the 'dog' that scampered alongside or behind Plath and her furies. He is, at times, wary, tail-wagging, frightened, dumb, loyal, etc. Meanwhile, the Plath of Birthday Letters is alternately vicious, appropriative, physically violent, tortured, 'fated' for death (and 'fated' as a muse-goddess, something Diane Middlebrook pays a lot of mind to in her 'biography' on their marriage, Her Husband), and a pathetic little girl snared in the trappings of MummyDaddyMummyDaddyDaddyDaddyMummy (this is almost verbatim the ending to one of the poems in this collection). Plath is envisioned as usually helpless, even when furious or taken with the poetic 'spirit.' She is the conduit for God in one of Hughes' poems, which may have been something she said--but constantly, she seems to be the conduit for just about everything, be it the Mummy/Daddy one-two-punch, the muse speaking either to her or to Hughes, the electric jolts of her madness, or for the cruelty Hughes tears down in her poetry.

Why should I care? This is, as people like Middlebrook and a number of other recent critics argue, a book that is 'in dialogue' with Plath's biography and poetic legacy. Sure. But more importantly, this is a dialogue in which Plath can never enter, being dead. So 35 years after her death (nearly 50 today), Birthday Letters leaves behind a snapshot of their marriage and their poetry that places Hughes in the supplicant position to his almost oracular, frightening, mad, brilliant (when he gives her that much), wife. I don't intend to run off and chip the 'Hughes' off SP's gravestone, but I wonder what the ethical ramifications of this portrayal are--it seems somehow implicitly violent for Hughes to 'talk back' to his wife in a way that not only enables those who blindly mythologize her, but diminishes her poetry as something neither she nor he could help or stand in the way. And I say he only hints at her 'brilliance' (which he has spoken of, with less trouble, on other occasions), because just as often, he suggests that her poetry is necessarily a nasty outlet for petty rages and gossip. Thus, in "The Rabbit Catcher" (speaking back to Plath's poem of the same name), he revises her vision of male violence--a poem that beautifully links the masculine adventurer's invasive interest in the natural world with sexual, domestic violence against women--to refigure himself as the hapless, lovelorn husband watching Plath cruelly 'snare' people in her poetry. But what Plath's poetry never did--though of course we like to pick moments that seem so transparently autobiographical--was stoop down to trivial gab sessions. If someone appeared in a violent poem--let's take "Daddy" for an easy example--that person was not *that person*; that person became myth, became conflated with a million other myths. "Daddy" may feature Otto Plath's German heritage and ill-fated stubbed-toe, but more importantly, the poem relates a more genuine concern with what Plath took to be a peculiarly feminine interest in domineering men, and in turn, located these issues of male dominance in a more global sphere--thus, the Holocaust imagery, the wonderfully Gothic conclusion. Hughes simply does not do 'confessional' in the way Plath did; Plath's goal was always (to my mind) to take the minute, the private, the domestic, and to weave larger-than-life scenarios from them. Thus, a cut thumb in "Cut" becomes a narrative of colonization and national violence; a jaded hausfrau is a disgruntled Eve, the "agonized side of a green Adam."

Hughes, instead, makes Plath--and more horribly, her poetry--a mockery. And if Plath can't speak back, what does this say about the history of women's writing being 'brought down a peg' by the final word of her male counterpart? It frightens me that there's such unabashed praise of a text that--yes, is tender and sometimes beautiful, and clearly is written with great feeling for their marriage, in good times and bad--finally leaves us with the feeling that Plath really *was* just the madwoman in the attic, and that Hughes, unwittingly loyal pup that he was, merely follows along to sand down the rough edges her audience simply 'can't handle'?

Not to mention, I don't find the poetry here all that great. There are moments where it's quite lucid, quite stunning--but mostly, it struck me as the sort of stuff you might see in an advanced undergraduate writing workshop. It leaves behind most of what makes Hughes' poetry so distinctively Hughes--with the exception of some of the descriptions of the natural world (I quite liked "The 59th Bear," for example), the collection often reeks of maudlin self-pity, repetitive imagery (which do not build to crescendo, but simmer out), and a usually frustrating speaking-I. I give it 3 stars because, well, I don't think it deserves less--but I do think it needs to be reconsidered on a more political level.

Whew. I'm babbling on. Maybe all this will only bother you if you're really into that whole generation of poetry. I get my panties in a twist over things like this--but perhaps it detracts from my enjoyment a bit too much. Any case, just ordered Hughes' Collected Poems, so I'm still willing to give the rest of the work a fair chance.

[هدى يحيى · Rating 1 out of 5]

لو أن هيوز أظهر ندمه
لو أنه ترك هذا العالم معترفا بذنبه
لو أنه أحب سيلفيا حقا
‏....‏
ماذا..؟
هل ستعود
هل سينتهي عذابها..؟؟

لما نحن القراء مهووسين بقصة سيلفيا مع تيد
ماذا سيعود بالنفع علينا إن ظللنا نتهمه حيا وميتا
‏..؟؟

سؤال وجيه

والإجابة ببساطة لأن سيلفيا لم تمت
لأنها تسكن كل من قرأها وتنبض بداخله
لأن أنينها لا نزال نسمعه بوضوح مع كل حرف جديد نقرؤه
ومع كل إعادة قراءة لأبياتها أو ما نثرته على الورق

لأن تيد قتلها ‏
ولم يعتذر..‏

::::::::::::

لا أكره تيد
أو على الأقل كنت أحاول ألا أفعل
ولكن بعد قراءة هذا الديوان
ما الذي علي فعله..؟

من على السطح تبدو القصائد عشق متوله في حب سيلفيا
‏بجميع صورها وحالاتها

ولكن ما إن تتعمق قليلا ستجد تيد كما هو
هو هو نفس الشخص الذي تسبب في انتحارها

لا نبرة أسف
لا شعور بالذنب
بل تبرير ودفاع عن النفس
مغطى بصور شعرية ‏
وإحالات إلى عالم الأساطير
الذي هو فيه خبير ومتمرس

::::::::::::

‏تمر عشرات من الأعوام وتيد محاط بشبح شيلفيا‏

لا يلسعه سياط الندم
بل يبحث مرارا عن كيفية استدرار عطف من حوله
والسيطرة على إرثها من الآهات المخنوقة
كي يمحي أي صورة سيئة في أعين الناس
فلا يزداد في كل مرة يفعلها إلا فشلا‏


هذه القصائد كتبها تيد للناس.. للجمهور
لا لسيلفيا
يبدو فيها في حالة إنكار مثيرة للشفقة
إنه ليس كتابا لتمجيد سيلفيا‏
لا للاعتذار
بل للدفاع عن النفس

::::::::::::

عاش هيوز سنواته الأخيرة في عزلة تكاد تكون شبه كاملة
صامتا عن كل اتهام ‏
مستغرقا في كتابة سطوره الأخيرة إلى العالم‏
والتي فيها ببريء نفسه من كل خطيئة
ويحيل سيلفيا إلى كائن مسكين يكاد يكون معتوه
ويتخيل شياطين وعفاريت خطفت حبيبته الصغيرة الضعيفة
من بين يديه


ولكن الحقيقة أن تيد ظل يكتب هذا الديوان ‏
المكون من 88 قصيدة‏
على مدار أكثر من ربع قرن ‏
وعنونه برسائل عيد الميلاد ‏
والذي هو مستمد من عنوان قصيدة أخرى ‏
أهدتها بلاث إياه‏
وهي :هدية عيد الميلاد ‏
والهدية كما يبدو هي الموت‏

What is this, behind this veil, is it ugly, is it beautiful?
It is shimmering, has it breasts, has it edges?

I am sure it is unique, I am sure it is what I want.
When I am quiet at my cooking I feel it looking, I feel it thinking

'Is this the one I am too appear for,
Is this the elect one, the one with black eye-pits and a scar?

Measuring the flour, cutting off the surplus,
Adhering to rules, to rules, to rules.

Is this the one for the annunciation?
My god, what a laugh!'

But it shimmers, it does not stop, and I think it wants me.
I would not mind if it were bones, or a pearl button.

I do not want much of a present, anyway, this year.
After all I am alive only by accident.

I would have killed myself gladly that time any possible way.
Now there are these veils, shimmering like curtains,

The diaphanous satins of a January window
White as babies' bedding and glittering with dead breath. O ivory!

It must be a tusk there, a ghost column.
Can you not see I do not mind what it is.

Can you not give it to me?
Do not be ashamed--I do not mind if it is small.

Do not be mean, I am ready for enormity.
Let us sit down to it, one on either side, admiring the gleam,

The glaze, the mirrory variety of it.
Let us eat our last supper at it, like a hospital plate.

I know why you will not give it to me,
You are terrified

The world will go up in a shriek, and your head with it,
Bossed, brazen, an antique shield,

A marvel to your great-grandchildren.
Do not be afraid, it is not so.

I will only take it and go aside quietly.
You will not even hear me opening it, no paper crackle,

No falling ribbons, no scream at the end.
I do not think you credit me with this discretion.

If you only knew how the veils were killing my days.
To you they are only transparencies, clear air.

But my god, the clouds are like cotton.
Armies of them. They are carbon monoxide.

Sweetly, sweetly I breathe in,
Filling my veins with invisibles, with the million

Probable motes that tick the years off my life.
You are silver-suited for the occasion. O adding machine-----

Is it impossible for you to let something go and have it go whole?
Must you stamp each piece purple,

Must you kill what you can?
There is one thing I want today, and only you can give it to me.

It stands at my window, big as the sky.
It breathes from my sheets, the cold dead center

Where split lives congeal and stiffen to history.
Let it not come by the mail, finger by finger.

Let it not come by word of mouth, I should be sixty
By the time the whole of it was delivered, and to numb to use it.

Only let down the veil, the veil, the veil.
If it were death

I would admire the deep gravity of it, its timeless eyes.
I would know you were serious.

There would be a nobility then, there would be a birthday.
And the knife not carve, but enter

Pure and clean as the cry of a baby,
And the universe slide from my side.

::::::::::::

كيف يتمكن لشخص يحب امرأة كسيلفيا
مرهفة الحس.. شاعرة عظيمة ‏
‏ تصارع الاكتئاب لسنوات

من أن يكون بهذه القسوة والأنانية
لا يكتفي بتحميلها مسئوليات فوق طاقتها
بل يتبجح بمغامراته النسائية التي لا تنتهي
ثم يترك لها البيت متخليا عن مسئولياته كاملة

حتى يتمكن منها الوجع فتنهي حياتها بهذه الطريقة البشعة

::::::::::::

ولم تتوقف الأهوال عند هذا الحد
لقد عاش تيد المأساة مرة تلو المرة
فهناك انتحار عشيقته التي ترك سيلفيا لأجلها بالغاز كذلك ‏
وقتلها معها ابنتهما شورا
ثم انتحار نيكولاس
ابنه من سيلفيا

فما هو نوع الشخص الذي تحدث له مآس كهذه
مرة بعد أخرى
فيظل على عناده وعماه الشخصي وإنكاره الرهيب

::::::::::::

عاش تيد في ظل سيلفيا ولا يزال
فبينما تعتبر هذه القصائد أفضل ما كتب على مدار حياته
في أراء معظم النقاد
من الناحية الأدبية
فإنها تبدو باهتة
جوار ما تركته بلاث من عبق شعري مشع ‏بألف نور ومضمخ بعطر دموعها

...

والقصائد كاملة موجودة بترجمة عربية
من إصدارات وزارة الثقافة بالكويت
سلسلة إبداعات عالمية
ولكنها في غاية السوء في الحقيقة
ثم وجدت نسخة أخرى فيها بعض القصائد
من الديوان بترجمة الشاعر سركون بولص
لم أطلع عليه ولكن أتوقع أن تكون أفضل‏

::::::::::::

��تمنى أن تكون وجدت السكينة يا سيد تيد
في العالم الآخر

ولكن عذرا
كل ما أستطعت فعله أن أكتب مراجعة عن ديوانك
لا أضمنها حرفا واحدا مما كتبت

آه
ولكن قصيدة سيلفيا وضعتها كاملة
مشعة.. بهية

شكرا لك على لا شيء
=)

مع الناقوس الزجاجي لا تنتهي الحكاية

[Bionic Jean · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. A marriage made in heaven—or in hell? A tempestuous marriage akin to Anthony and Cleopatra. Passion and drama played out on a very public arena. Many will know of the controversial couple, yet perhaps not know Ted Hughes’s poetry.

It is Sylvia Plath who has the adulation, the tragic story; committing suicide in 1963, seven years after her marriage to Ted Hughes. At the time I was not aware of this, being a little too young. I did come across Ted Hughes’s poetry as a teenager, and enjoyed the poems I read by him. I did vaguely know he had been married to another poet, an American, who had killed herself, but who had not written much. Her works didn’t seem very easy to find, and at the time I tended to not read much poetry from outside the UK. Sylvia Plath passed me by for many decades.

Ted Hughes had a commanding presence. He was a solid, bulky, tall man, who seemed dark in both looks and voice, speaking as I did then (my accent has softened over the years) with a marked Northern accent. I liked the dour, dark timbre of his voice. He had no pretensions, or as we Yorkshire folk would say “no side”. I was interested to read more, thinking of him as a local boy made good, born and bred as I was, in what was then the West Riding of Yorkshire, and into a working class family. Direct-speaking intellectuals from the North of England always held a fascination for me; it was not long since the “angry young men”, and kitchen sink dramas. My boyfriend gave Ted Hughes’s fourth book of poems, “Crow” to me for my birthday, when it was first published in 1970.

It was very different. Ted Hughes was finding his unique poetic voice. I wasn’t sure I liked this one, or fully understood it. Since then I have dipped in and out of his adult poetry collections, always finding them brilliant but challenging reads.

Often his imagery is raw and brutal. Most of his poetry is deliberately impersonal, and he is said to have despised the direct use of autobiographical material, believing that to make poetry of any value, direct experience needed to be imaginatively transformed. But was this approach to writing, a defence mechanism? Was it possibly anything to do with the hatred which was targeted at him? To understand the shift in both focus and style in this volume of poetry, and also appreciate its uniqueness, it is probably necessary to look a little deeper at its context.

During the 1970s the work, life and death of Sylvia Plath became very high profile. And the furore that followed her death was fierce and vindictive. Many Americans, and some non-Americans, blamed Ted Hughes for her early death, and were bitter that her great talent; her potential for perhaps writing future works of poetic genius, had been snatched away. For some, it became a feminist political concern, having little to do with the poetry of either. It became part of an agenda of masculine oppression, in which Ted Hughes was very much the bad guy, and was publicly vilified. He remained close-mouthed.

Whatever demons Ted Hughes might have been facing about his young wife killing herself, he only made tentative forays occasionally, with single poems published in magazines. Meanwhile his relationship with Sylvia Plath had been the theme of five biographies of her, most of them hostile to Ted Hughes, as well as her own writing which often featured their relationship, directly in her journals and indirectly in her poetry. Ted Hughes built a protective wall around himself, and continued to write poetry about the wild, and about animals. But these were increasingly brutal, harsh, bitter poems; impersonal poetry which gave little away about the inner man.

To add to the pressure, not only did the much-lauded Sylvia Plath, viewed as the martyr and heroine under his tyrannical regime, commit suicide, but six years later, Ted Hughes’s mistress Assia Wevill also took both her own life, and that of her young daughter “Shura”.* Much later, a third tragedy was the suicide of Sylvia and Ted’s son Nicholas, who hanged himself in 2009.**

Ted Hughes certainly suffered. He felt that only imagination could heal, and that poetry was the expression of this imagination. In his later life he felt cursed, and explored myths, Buddhist meditation, and esoteric practices such as shamanism and alchemy, trying self-healing to cure his suffering and feelings of loss, acute illnesses and guilt. Yet always in the shadows there was Sylvia Plath; the rumours, detractors and the critics. Incredibly, over 25 years, Sylvia Plath is explicitly mentioned only once, in the 1979 poem “Heptonstall Cemetery”.

And now we know that, in secret, he wrote the poems in Birthday Letters, his final collection of poetry, published significantly only months before his death. He had said the right time to tell the truth was just before he was going to die, and sure enough, he died that winter suffering a heart attack after almost two years of surviving cancer. All are about, or addressed to Sylvia Plath, despite all the (very public) affairs he had had with other women and his current marriage to Carol, a nurse far younger than him, whom he had married in 1970. Carol remained loyal to Ted Hughes, fiercely defending his privacy on the Sylvia Plath issue, until his death.

It seems strange to realise that Birthday Letters was published twenty years ago, in 1998; the fascination with the myth and mystery of Ted and Sylvia is so strong and perpetuating. It sets out to put the record straight, and correct the distorted, gossipy speculations he had been subject to for so many years. As he wrote in 1967:

“the struggle truly to possess his own experience, in other words to regain his genuine self, has been man’s principal occupation … ever since he first grew this enormous surplus of brain.”

Prescient words indeed. And again in 1989, in a letter answering criticism about his handling of Sylvia Plath’s estate:

“I hope each of us owns the facts of her or his own life”.

There are eighty eight poems in Birthday Letters. They are not literal “letters”, as one might suppose, nor sentimental or cosy, as the title may imply. Expecting softness from Ted Hughes is rather like expecting Thomas Hardy’s novels to be cheerful and optimistic. No, these poems are in some ways more accessible than many of his other adult collections, but they are as brittle and uncompromising as any he had written. He is writing to his strength, and never sweetens the pill. It means that they are difficult to read on an emotional level, and the reader may need to pause, and take a breath now and then. Even when refined and distilled into poetry, it is a heady concoction of dark passion, madness, and violent dispute.

They do not read as High Art, but mostly as explicit, unashamed, sometimes indignant and accusatory poems ostensibly addressed to Sylvia, but actually intended for the public. He is quite direct: we know who he is writing about, and what he is writing about. For far too long their public lives and the tragedy had been centre-stage, and the poetry had taken second place. Now Ted Hughes turns round to face us squarely; he wants us to hear his side of the story.

The “Birthday” of the book’s title probably refers to the poems by Sylvia Plath such as “Morning Song”, “Stillborn”, “A Birthday Present”, “Three Women”, and “Poem for a Birthday”. Here she used birth as a metaphor for artistic creation and the birthday itself as a sign of self-renewal. Clearly this accords with Ted Hughes’s intention.

The collection was written over a period of at least 25 years, and the numerous drafts held in the British Museum are much edited and scrawled over. They are virtually illegible, having been worked over so much. Ted Hughes’s secret “work in progress” was perhaps cathartic: a way of dealing with the vilification he experienced.

It is chronological, charting their relationship from 1956, when they met for the first time at a party in Cambridge. Sylvia Plath records being mesmerised, both by this powerful and imposing figure, and also by his work. In her journal, she describes their first meeting, saying:

“kiss me, and you will see how important I am …

and I was stamping and he was stamping on the floor, and then kissed me bang smash on the mouth …

when he kissed my neck I bit him long and hard on the cheek“

It makes readers wonder what the others in their circle of friends made of their volatile relationship. Did they stand back, feeling the fizz of an electric charge emanating from them?

The book jacket is a painting by the poets’ daughter Frieda Hughes. Similarly explosive, it shows a flow of lava; a bubbling eruption of red and yellow on a lesser background of blue and brown.

And here is part of Ted Hughes’s seventh poem, “St. Botolph’s”:

“You meant to knock me out
with your vivacity. I remember
Little from the rest of that evening.
I slid away with my girl-friend. Nothing
Except her hissing rage in a doorway
And my stupefied interrogation
Of your blue headscarf from my pocket
And the swelling ring-moat of tooth-marks
That was to brand my face for the next month.
The me beneath it for good.”

Sylvia Plath had shocked him by biting his cheek, thus branding him. Such a violent gesture must have been a portent of things to come. Many of the poems describe Ted Hughes being stunned, trapped and manipulated by Sylvia Plath, the puppet-master. In the fourth poem, “Visit” we learn Sylvia Plath’s determination to control the drama of their relationship:

“ … Nor did I know I was being auditioned
For the male lead in your drama …
As if a puppet were being tried on its strings,
Or a dead frog’s legs touched by electrodes.”

echoing precisely what the speaker in Plath’s poem “Soliloquy of the Solipsist” years ago had said about herself:

“ … my look’s leash
Dangles the puppet-people.”

None of these poems is affectionate or tinged with nostalgia. Ted Hughes renders very precisely what one biographer called Plath’s “not-niceness”. In the very first poem, “Fulbright Scholars”, Ted Hughes disinterestedly describes Sylvia Plath’s photograph, noticing her false grin:

“for the cameras, the judges, the strangers, the frighteners”.

We see the measured distance between Sylvia Plath as her true self, and the Sylvia Plath she presents to her public.

Moreover we see an impartiality, a distance between Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. The first line of the poem: “Where was it, in the Strand?”, establishes a vagueness of memory, another crucial distance. We see this objective view of Sylvia Plath throughout the poems. Sometimes he even seems to dislike her, likening her to a “baby monkey”, with “monkey-elegant fingers”. He describes her face as a “Cabbage-Patch doll”, or “a tight ball of joy”, with eyes “squeezed in your face”. Sometimes he sees a formless face, “a prototype face”, using words such as “molten”, “unreal”, “never a face in itself”, or “a stage”.

The poems have a narrative feel, and flow easily, so we feel we may at last be getting a candid look into the private lives of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, after years of speculation at Ted Hughes’s inexplicable silence. There are many signs that Sylvia Plath herself was filled with a sense of tragic inevitability. But there are references to people and events which were private, and may not have significance except to the writer. Many poems remind us of Sylvia Plath’s obsession with “Daddy”, which disturbs, intrudes, and dominates many of them. ***

As well as these uncomfortable observations, there are poems in which Ted Hughes seems to want to answer poems written by Sylvia Plath about himself; to present his defence—or is it an attack? He has clearly felt exposed by Sylvia’s writing about him; about what he once called in a letter, their “bad moments”.

The fifth poem, “Sam”, deliberately recalls the runaway-horse which Sylvia Plath had described in her own poem: “Whiteness I Remember”. But now Ted Hughes imagines himself as the stallion and writes:

“When I jumped a fence you strangled me …
Flung yourself off and under my feet to trip me
And tripped me and lay dead. Over in a flash.“

“Trophies” is a comeback to Sylvia Plath’s famous poem “Pursuit” (“There is a panther stalks me down”). He refutes it, claiming possession; he too, had been pursued:

“… Still smiling
As it carried me off I detached
The hairband carefully from between its teeth
And a ring from its ear, from my trophies“

Without the reference, it would be difficult to understand the relevance or significance of this poem.

In “Black Coat” he objects indignantly, giving a sharp response to Sylvia Plath’s “Man in Black”, with the lines:

“I had no idea I had stepped
Into the telescopic sights
Of the paparazzo sniper
Nested in your brown iris“

Many poems are answers, which feel like retaliations; tit for tat. The list goes on: a straightforward narrative poem, “Ouija”, is a deliberate contrast with Sylvia Plath’s highly complex descriptive poem of the same name. Others target and reference specific poems, such as “The Owl”, for “Owl”, “Wuthering Heights”, and “The Rabbit Catcher” are clearly comments on the poems of the same name. In “The Earthenware Head”, he criticises Sylvia Plath’s poem “The Lady and the Earthenware Head”, claiming that her methods of compositions are merely strategies of evasion:

“… You ransacked thesaurus in your poem about it,
Veiling its mirror, rhyming yourself into safety…“

The reader may wonder, isn’t this exactly what Ted Hughes himself was doing, before he wrenched this collection from his bowels?

Ted Hughes even seems to feel the need to reclaim his own children:

“Life After Death:

“…Your son’s eyes, which had unsettled us
With your Slavic Asiatic
Epicanthic fold, but would become
So perfectly your eyes,
Became wet jewels.
The hardest substance of the purest pain
As I fed him in his high white chair“

In “Remission”:
“ … In a free-floating crib, an image that sneezed
And opened a gummed mouth and started to cry.
I was there, I saw it.“

The last sentence seems to be a cry from the heart.

It would be easy to think of these poems as antagonistic, but that would be a travesty. Their tumultuous relationship was very complex, and the reader sees violent passions at its core, both of love and such ferocious dispute that it borders on hate.

Take this, where Ted Hughes describes the response of critics to Sylvia Plath’s early achievements:

“Their homeopathic letters,
Envelopes full of carefully broken glass
To lodge behind your eyes so you would see”

“Nobody wanted your dance,
Nobody wanted your strange glitter, your floundering
Drowning life and your effort to save yourself,
Treading water, dancing the dark turmoil,
Looking for something to give.”

Surely the poet who wrote this, felt her pain as his own. And in a dream recounting Sylvia’s hideous recurring nightmares, full of images to do with graves, her father’s illness and death, we have a rare sight of his gentle steadfastness:

“Dream Life:

“ … not knowing
What had frightened you
Or where your poetry had followed you from
With its blood-sticky feet. Each night
I hypnotized calm into you,
Courage, understanding and calm
Did it help? Each night
You descended again …”

One of the most significant, and poignant, poems which I feel offers an insight into the closeness of their relationship, is “Apprehensions” from 1962. This is again a reply to a poem of the same name by Sylvia Plath, which is a probe into her uneasy mind. She describes her pain and terror at the time:

“ … Is there no way out of the mind?
Steps at my back spiral into a well.
There are no trees or birds in this world,
There is only sourness …”

Her poem is full of symbolism and colour, in which calm images only heighten her utter dark despair, and fear of death.

In answer to this, Ted Hughes’s poem is a direct personal message to her: a descriptive analysis which takes both snapshots of her life, as well as images, from her poems.

Apprehensions:

“Your writing was also your fear,
At times it was your terror, that all
Your wedding presents, your dreams, your husband
Would be taken from you
By the terror’s goblins …
 
You could see it, there, in your pen.
Somebody took that too.”****

Many poems such as this attempt to unveil Sylvia Plath’s real, hidden or other self. In 1982, Ted Hughes wrote:

“though I spent every day with her for six years, and was rarely separated from her for more than two or three hours at a time, I never saw her show her real self to anybody – except, perhaps, in the last three months of her life.”

Sylvia Plath seemed to know from the start that their relationship was doomed:

“I desire things that will destroy me in the end”

But there are just a few poems which are enjoyable as anecdotal memories, such as “The 59th Bear” about an episode near the Grand Canyon. “The Pink Wool Knitted Dress” is about their wedding day, four months after they had first met, on “Bloomsday” in 1956, purposely chosen in honour of James Joyce. It is filled with joy, expectation and a little trepidation about marriage. And another, “Chaucer”, is oddly unrepresentative.

I let out a giggle reading this poem, whereupon Chris (who had given me a copy of the newly published “Crow” all those years ago) looked up at me and enquired, a little puzzled, “Aren’t you reading Ted Hughes”. Of course I then had to read him the whole poem, which is an hilarious description of Sylvia Plath declaiming Chaucer to a field of cows. Ted Hughes could write humour! Who knew?

Unlike some, I do not think this collection is the best thing he ever wrote. I think some of his best poems lie elsewhere. But it is unique, and deserves 5 stars for being “amazing”. Both more accessible than many of his other poetry collections, it also has many deeper layers, for those who wish to explore. Allusions and references to Sylvia Plath’s own poetry abound, as well as the more evident snapshots of their life together. In some ways he opens Pandora’s box to reveal more of himself than many ever expected him to do. It is often regarded as Ted Hughes’s legacy, and is one of the highest selling poetry titles of all time, selling over half a million copies. One wonders whether this is from a wish to read his poetry, or more of an inquisitive prying into a well publicised doomed literary marriage. And should we give more credence to the last person to speak in their defence?

Birthday Letters stops short of describing Sylvia Plath’s death, but one last poem “Last Letter” goes some way to solving the mystery of what happened, the weekend before Sylvia Plath killed herself in 1963. Apparently Sylvia Plath had written Ted Hughes a kind of suicide note on the Friday, and it perversely arrived too early, so that he read it.

The poem was read on Radio 4 in 2010 by Melvyn Bragg, who had found it at Carol Hughes's prompting. At the last line “Your wife is dead” his voice wobbled and he nearly broke down. ****

What we will never know, is how balanced this poetry is. It is by no means a final statement of “fact”. Clearly Ted Hughes felt that these poems were honest: a true representation of their intense relationship as he saw it.

“I was there, I saw it” he protests in one of these poems.

But it is difficult to be married to an icon.

*see comments

[Pink · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wanted to hate this.

I've read enough by Sylvia Plath to know that I love her.

I've read enough about her relationship with Ted Hughes to know that I hate him.

What bullshit is that?

Of course I know nothing about either of them.

I know what's been written of their marriage, it's breakdown and the next chapter of suicides in Ted's life.

That tells me nothing.

What I read in this collection was rawness of love and loss. His side of their relationship.

Was it any truer than the accusations that followed? Who knows.

But it seems you can be both pro-Plath and pro-Hughes.

Oh and apparently he's quite good at poetry.

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

'She and I slept in each other's arms,
Naked and easy as lovers, a month of nights.
Yet never made love once. A holy law
Had invented itself, somehow, for me.
But she too served it, like a priestess,
Tender, kind and stark naked beside me'


'The dark ate at you. And the fear
Of being crushed. 'A huge dark machine',
'The grinding indifferent
Millstone of circumstance'. After
Watching the orange sunset, these were the words
You put on a page. They had come to you
When I did not. When you tried
To will me up the stair, this terror
Arrived instead. While I
Most likely was just sitting'


'You waited,
Knowing yourself helpless in the tweezers
Of the life that judged you, and I saw
The flayed nerve, the unhealable face-wound
Which was all you had for courage.
I saw that what gripped you, as you sipped,
Were terrors that had killed you once already.
Now, I see, I saw, sitting, the lonely
Girl who was going to die'


'How tiny an adventure
To stay so monumental in our marriage,
A slight ordeal of all that might be,
And a small thrill-breath of what many live by,
And a small prize, a toy miniature
Of the life that might have bonded us
Into a single animal, a single soul'


'You were weeping
Your biggest, purest joy. The placenta
Already meaningless, asphyxiated.
Your eyes dazzling tears as I thought
No other brown eyes could, ever'


'Your writing was also your fear,
At times it was your terror, that all
Your wedding presents, your dreams, your husband
Would be taken from you
By the terror's goblins. Yout typewriter
Would be taken. Your sewing-machine. Your children.
All would be taken'


'I remember your fingers. And your daughter's
Fingers remember your fingers
In everything they do.
Her fingers obey and honour your fingers,
The lares and penates of our house'

[Emma Scott · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wish I could rate it higher, but decades after SP’s death, he’s still writing about her genius furies as if they all bore the name Otto and not Ted. As if her childhood grief absolved him. I lost count of how many times he referenced “Daddy” in the poems about her last days.

As long as your daughter’s words can stir a candle.
She could hardly tell us apart in the end.

But Sylvia had already laid her father to rest in her poems:

There’s a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through. —Daddy

Her Ariel collection was a purging, not a vortex that sucked her down. That came later, deeper in winter, when the poems lay unpublished on her desk and TH had taken a second mistress.

And while I don’t blame TH for SP’s death, he was careless and selfish, and nowhere in these poems is there a reckoning. His first mistress is described as some witchy puppet master carrying a destiny he could not avoid.

All immense and admitted Team Sylvia bias aside, I can’t say the collection itself stirred much even if I tried to look at it as poetry for poetry’s sake.

I’m afraid the greatest strength lies not in the craft of these poems but in their subject.

Edit to Add: While some have viewed this collection as unfair as SP is no longer here to defend herself, I would HIGHLY recommend Heather Clark's amazing bio of SP, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath It's the most cohesive work of SP's life yet, and without having read it first, the biographical details in Birthday Letters would have been incomprehensible.

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this because I am teaching a postwar American fiction class this spring and we are reading Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (and some of her poetry) for the class. I hadn't wanted to read it so much, I hadn't wanted to revisit my anguished feelings about her life and poetry prior to her suicide, but I had given the enrolled students a chance to choose novels from this period, and some of the class wanted to read it, so I added it. Then, I recalled never having read this book by Ted Hughes, her former husband and equally famous poet. Hughes is a fabulous poet who has been vilified to this day for being partly responsible for her suicide, as he was having an affair when they were married (and knew she was suicidal when they were married), divorced her… and then, to add fuel to this particular fire, the woman who he had had an affair with also killed herself and their son… and then later, Plath's and Hughes' son committed suicide. So you can' very well ignore all this, and it might be best to read all the biographies attending to all this mess, but I haven't done that. I just read the poems and skimmed a few dozen of my fellow Goodreads reviewer's reviews, and my assessment is that Hughes is a terrific poet and these poems (which he began writing after she died and wrote until his death in this, his last book, poems we are told he had never intended to publish, until he finally chose to…), written as "letters" to his ex-wife, are wonderful, brilliant. Some see them as self-serving, as a character assassination, as a justification for his leaving her and as a castigation of her madness and suicide and suicidal poetry, and while I can see that, my reading of these poems is that they are, as poems, amazing, and as a kind of biographical exercise (flawed as they all are in some respects?) amazing, moving, and ultimately loving, his coming to terms with what she was to him. There are some that do seem more "self serving" such as "Rabbit Catchers" but you know, it and other places such as this seem just searingly honest and self revealing and anguished and not whiningly self justifying. Maybe if I read more of the biographies I might fault him more as a man, but the poetry seems brilliant to me, poem for poem, attempt after attempt to understand in one of the only ways he knows how, through the writing of poems. Do you need to have read Plath to appreciate it? Well, he is in dialogue with many of her poems, and even if you read this book without revisiting the poems, you will (as I will) read or re-read her poems (and maybe life, too), in part through his poems. Maybe, if you hate Hughes as some kind of murderer (and I don't, I don't blame him for her death, not based on what I know, anyway), you will see this as his getting the last word, but I don't read it this way. It's great art, great literature, and sometimes such work is accomplished by imperfect human beings, even assholes, but for me, I don't know about him, but his poetry in this (and in other volumes), is amazing.

[Emmeline · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poems that offer a fascinating glimpse behind the curtain of the Plath/Hughes marriage.

Although these poems start from the knowledge of Plath’s suicide, much of their charm comes from their humanizing portrayal of a non-famous Plath and Hughes before all of that. They are a British/American couple, and much of their attraction/courtship/marriage seems to have been a dance of culture shock, the appeal of the new, and the exoticization of both new and old country. Of their wedding, Hughes writes:

I was a post-war, utility son-in-law!
Not quite the Frog Prince. Maybe the Swineherd
Stealing this daughter’s pedigree dreams
From under her watchtowered searchlit future.

On their honeymoon they go to Paris:

Your Paris, I thought, was American
…frame after frame
Street after street, of Impressionist paintings.
…
I kept my Paris from you. My Paris
Was only just not German. The capital
Of the Occupation and old nightmare

He goes with her to America, she lives with him in London and Devon, but always they are foreigners regarding each other, seeing the other through filters of imperfect understanding. This strangeness in the other is likely why it takes Hughes a while to notice her illness, which surfaces in “Moonwalk:”

Like a day pushed inside out. Everything
In negative. Your mask
Bleak as cut iron, a half-shell
Shucked off the moon.

It’s no small skill to make compelling reading of a story the audience is all sure to know. And Hughes mostly succeeds, although perhaps success is the wrong word. He remembers Plath in a hundred moments throughout their time together. He remembers her writing, suffering, travelling, giving birth, picking daffodils, he examines photographs of her, he apportions blame (though largely not on himself). Most poems are touched by the knowledge of what is to come, a few skitter past the main event. Only occasionally are other people allowed to intrude on this landscape of two and their fairy-tale symbols: the ghostly presence of Plath’s mother in America and her dead father, the bruised children, grappling with a motherless world. Once, the obliquely mentioned mistress. Otherwise there are birds, foxes, fish, bears, a bull, and items of landscape, the moon, wet England, canyons in America.

The middle section occasionally feels repetitive: a memory excavated and turned around, reversed upon itself, and always fed by the foreboding or forewarning of a coming death. This probably reflects their composition over twenty-five years.

And there’s plenty of back-and-forth with Plath’s own poetry. I’m not the person to comment, as I don’t know it nearly well enough. But even without this intertextuality, Hughes’ final collection is a good read. It’s not always complimentary to Plath, but there is an undercurrent of love. Hughes’ real rage, you get the feeling, is for her die-hard fans.

[Amy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ugh, what a chore this was to get through. I've read random Hughes poems before and have liked them, so I was surprised and disappointed that I did not like this collection--at all. Where to begin? Maybe with "You had a fever. You had a real ailment." This was the condescending tone that Hughes employed throughout many of his poems. I am sure he had a very complicated relationship with Plath, and being involved with someone with mental illness is very challenging (and I can imagine the anger I'd feel for a loved one who committed suicide), but the poems here come off as so incredibly biased that it is frustrating and gross. He writes of her physical appearance repeatedly, her Americanness, her nerves, her Daddy, her death wish. "Now, I see, I saw, sitting, the lonely/ Girl who was going to die." Okay. But I could write a poem about those things regarding Plath, too. Because I don't know her--it is shallow. As her former husband, I would expect a bit more, especially in 200 pages. Where was her humanity? Where was his? The most I got from him was "If I had grasped that whatever comes with a fox/ Is what tests a marriage and proves it is a marriage--/ I would not have failed the test. Would you have failed it?/ But I failed. Our marriage had failed." Bleck. I guess I just don't think this thing was especially moving or anything I think poetry is supposed to be--inventive, playful, honest.

I did like the poems "The 59th Bear," "Fate Playing," and "A Picture of Otto," and:

"In my position, the right witchdoctor/ Might have caught you in flight with his bare hands,/ Tossed you, cooling, one hand to the other,/ Godless, happy, quieted.// I managed/ A wisp of your hair, your ring, your watch, your nightgown."

"You wanted to study/ Your stars--the guards/ of your prison yard"

"You kept being overwhelmed/ By the misery of the place, like a nausea."

"A land with maybe one idea--snake."

"'This is evil,'/ you said. "This is real evil.'/ Whatever it was, the whole landscape wore it/ Like a plated mask. 'What is it?'/ I kept saying. 'What is it?'/ As if it might force the whatever/ To materialize, maybe standing by our care,/ Maybe some old Indian.// 'Maybe it's the earth,'/ You said. 'Or maybe it's ourselves./ This emptiness is sucking something out of us./ Here where there's only death, maybe our life/ Is terrifying. Maybe it's the life/ In us/ Frightening the earth, and frightening us.'"

"A rainy wedding picture/ On a foreign grave, among lilies--/ And just beneath it, unseen, the real bones/ Still undergoing everything."

"You'd caught something./ ... Those terrible, hypersensitive/ Fingers of your verse closed round it and/ Felt it alive. The poems, like smoking entrails,/ Came soft into your hands."

"It darkened a darkness darker."

"In the pit of red/ You hid from the bone-clinic whiteness.// But the jewel you lost was blue."

[Amanda NEVER MANDY · Rating 1 out of 5]

I went on a Sylvia Plath reading binge this year, and it was quite an experience. Her stuff hits hard. An emotional freight train. There was one day that hit the hardest of all, and it led to me rapid-fire jotting down my thoughts. At the end of it I decided that I owed Ted Hughes a fair shake, which led to me adding this collection of poetry to my reading list. I figured if it were a decent enough read, I would read more of his work. If it was not, then I was done.

THOSE THOUGHTS:

Hughes could burn all the evidence he wanted. It does not change how obvious the situation was.

They met and fell in love.

She put him and his career first. Carved out some time for her own career in between boosting his, but nothing like what was done for him.

They had children.

She still put him first, but it wasn’t to the level before because the kids needed attention too. Her career went on super pause until the time came that she decided she wanted a slice of time back for it. That is when the ridiculous amount of “Ted is so amazing” comments dropped off from the letters to her mom.

They moved out into the country. He traveled to the city to “work” (find a new woman to dote on him), leaving her at home with the kids.

It fell apart for him when his “agent” (wife) couldn’t stroke him to the full level of selfish need he required. I bet if you dig into his affair partner’s relationship with him (the end of it), you would notice the same shitty behavior.

To know that his selfish piece of shit ass got to live off the residuals of HER career after she died is sickening.

To know that all she talked about was THEM TOGETHER and their FUTURE TOGETHER in her correspondence. Her vision of their shared careers and shared successes. At no point did I read anything selfish in her letters. It was all about putting his needs above everyone else’s.

I am sure he did struggle with living with her mental illness, but cheating is never the answer. He was a selfish prick for that. With that said, is he to blame for her taking her own life? No. She had a lot going on. She was a single mother of two small children trying to deal with the strain of her own career mixed with the ridiculously high level of expectations she had for herself on top of the mental illness she suffered from.

I compare her letters to the ones Vincent van Gogh wrote. So much the same. The light battling against the darkness. The desire to live through their art and only accept the best of the best from themselves. The reaching out to loved ones to share in all that they were experiencing but done in a way to protect those loved ones from as much of the dark side of things as possible. When it broke through, it was devastating.

SO….

I wrote the above and felt bad for talking crap and making assumptions. I told myself to delete it after I read this collection of poetry. When the time came to do so I couldn’t because I still strongly believed in all that I wrote. Reading his words did nothing to change that.

ON TO THE OFFICIAL REVIEW:

His poetry was dull. It put me to sleep. The verses that briefly woke me up only did so because they irritated me. I won’t share any of them here because I don’t want to give his voice an audience.

One star to a collection that left nothing worth remembering.

[Roman Clodia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Given Hughes' notorious reluctance to speak about his volatile marriage to Sylvia Plath, this collection came as a shock when it appeared in 1998. Comprising poems written since Plath's suicide in 1963 this is both intimate and a public dialogue, a way of speaking back to Plath, her poems, and also the world which sometimes turned Hughes into a patriarchal monster of a husband.

The best of the poems draw on Plath's own works, re-using her texts, titles, imagery and language to offer Hughes' side of the story: 'Setebos', and 'Night-ride on Ariel' are both particularly vindicatory, blaming everyone else from Plath's mother, to her college patron and even her psychiatrists for her ultimate fate - notably all female. And 'Freedom of Speech' is a macabre and bitter vision of Plath's 60th birthday party.

These feel more cathartic than anything else and the deliberate comparisons they draw with Plath's own work, especially the Ariel collection, serve to highlight the brilliance of Plath even at her most vitriolic and self-destructive. So these may not be the best of Hughes' poetry, but as one side of a contentious and ongoing poetic and personal dialogue these are indispensable.

[Alexis Hall]

I'm not actually a huge fan of Ted Hughes as a writer.

As a human being--whose life and misdeeds are basically publicly property--I have no comment.

I like this, I'm almost afraid to say, because it is ugly. Self-justifying and painful and tender and unpleasant. An raw mixture of unspeakable things.

[Jonathan Terrington · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ted Hughes wrote Birthday Letters across his life and published it shortly before his death. Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath had once been married and divorced before Plath committed suicide. This anthology of poetry is as a result a collection of poems addressing Plath as 'you' like a letter, a response to her Ariel (as seen in the references to 'ariel' and 'bees' in various poems. One problem of criticism of the poetry however, is a criticism that haunts many books unfairly. That this is merely about Plath and Hughes relationship and can only be enjoyed, or has only been successful due to the 'inside glimpse' at a fascinating character of literary fame. However I personally dislike labels for anything and to put this anthology into a box as 'merely about Plath' limits the potency of each poem. I cannot deny that they focus on Plath but that said, as poems they are brilliant on their own.

Take the following extract from The Blue Flannel Suit as an example of the simple elegance of Hughes' work.

"What assessors
Waited to see you justify the cost
And redeem their gamble. What a furnace
Of eyes waited to prove your metal. I watched
The strange dummy stiffness, the misery,
Of your blue flannel suit, its straitjacket, ugly
Half-approximation to your idea
Of the properties you hoped to ease into,
And your horror in it. And the tanned
Almost green undertinge of your face
Shrunk to its wick, your scar lumpish, your plaited
Head pathetically tiny."

I particularly love the virtuosity of the above poem. The phrasing of "what a furnace / Of eyes waited to prove your metal" in this particular poem is particularly fascinating. The imagery is vibrant and evocative while also dissociative. A reader would not normally link furnaces and eyes but in the way Hughes does this it makes you think about the heated stares, the molten emotion of those eyes looking to find fault.

Each poem is individual and addresses different elements of daily life with Plath or who Plath was as a woman. Yet each poem fits neatly into the anthology as part of a whole. I have not read any other anthology that maintains such a constant style, as I mentioned while reading there is a unique symmetry in this poetry.

I am a fan of various mythologies and references to those mythologies litter Hughes' work here. The Minotaur is only one of those and uses mythology to refer to the breakdown of their marriage:

"The bloody end of the skein
That unravelled your marriage,
Left your children echoing
Like tunnels in a labyrinth."

That poem speaks for itself, as does this from The Badlands:

"Right across America
We went looking for you. Lightning
Had ripped your clothes off
And signed your cheekbone. It came
Out of the sun's explosion
Over Hiroshima, Nagasaki,
As along the ridge of a mountain
Under the earth, and somehow
Through death-row and the Rosenbergs.
They took the brunt of it."

On the whole while I may have liked several poems more than others (The Badlands, The Blue Flannel Suit, The Moonwalk, The Rabbit Catcher and The Minotaur for example) I found this to be a great whole collection of poetry. There were no obvious flawed poems to say the least. I certainly recommend this as one of the better poetry collections I have read. And I would finish by noting that it certainly does not deserve to be passed off as 'merely talking about Sylvia'. It is a magnificent work of planned and lyrical poetry.

[Ρένα Λούνα · Rating 5 out of 5]

Την πρώτη φορά που το διάβασα, ήμουν πολύ θυμωμένη – εδώ που τα λέμε, ακόμα είμαι. Το είχε πει και ο Allen, γνωστός μπουρδολόγος «Sylvia Plath. Interesting poetess whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic by the college-girl mentality». Παράλογο δεν είναι να είναι κανείς θυμωμένος με τον Χιούζ ή να λατρεύει την Πλαθ σαν να τους ήξερε; Δεν ήμασταν στο πάρτι του λογοτεχνικού κύκλου του περιοδικού St. Botolph’s Review, δεν είδαμε να του δαγκώνει το αυτί. Δεν πήγαμε μαζί τους Ισπανία να δούμε όντως την Πλαθ να σπάει από την ωμότητα της ταυρομαχίας, δεν κάναμε βόλτες μαζί τους στο Μπόστον Κόμον, ούτε πικ νικ στον Καμ του Κέμπριτζ, ούτε, όπως φαίνεται κλείσαμε μαζί τους το σπίτι στην Οδό Ιτιάς νούμερο 9. Δεν πήγαμε ούτε στην κηδεία της, όπου φαν της Πλαθ του πετούσαν πέτρες.

Δεν θα τους μάθουμε ποτέ, δεν θα τους καταλάβουμε, δεν μπορούμε να ερμηνεύσουμε τίποτα, εκτός από το πώς νιώθουμε όταν διαβάζουμε την ποίησή τους. Την πρώτη φορά που το διάβασα, ήμουν θυμωμένη. Το κρατούσα στο πίσω κάθισμα του αυτοκινήτου χωρίς καν να κοιτάω την σακούλα Παπασωτηρίου: «Μα όταν τον γνώρισε ήδη κουβαλούσε στην πλάτη της μερικές απόπειρες». «Ναι αλλά», συνεχίζει να μονολογεί το college girl teen mentality, «Ο δεσμός με την Γουέβιλ δεν βοήθησε. Ένα χρόνο μετά τον χωρισμό τους εκείνη αυτοκτονεί. Και άλλα έξι χρόνια μετά, αυτοκτονεί η Γουέβιλ». Φριχτά και ποταπά αυτά τα war zones ε; Δεν οδηγούν ποτέ πουθενά.

Τα "Γράμματα γενεθλίων" είναι μια συγκλονιστική συλλογή ποιημάτων που πλέον με άφησα να την διαβάσω χωρίς την παραφιλολογία της τρελής φαν της Σύλβια (γιατί αυτή ακριβώς είμαι). Πρόκειται για τα ημερολόγια ζωής τους, παραφυσικά, σπαρακτικά και γοτθικά σαν καθολικός ναός. Σκοτεινά και απελπιστικά τρυφερά. Το ότι ο Χιουζ ήταν ταλαντούχος το ήξερα. Τον περιέγραψε η Σύλβια σαν το απόλυτο golden boy, εντός και εκτός πλαισίου. Αλλά εδώ διάβασα κάτι τρομερό που νομίζω με άλλαξε λίγο – ευτυχώς. Κύριες και κύριοι, ο Χιουζ δεν είναι κάποιος που θα μπορούσα να συμπαθήσω (γιατί άλλωστε), αλλά έχω την φριχτή υποψία, πως κάποτε την λάτρεψε την Σύλβια, με κάθε σαιξπηρικό του κύτταρο.

«Δεν θα συνέχιζες με το τραπεζάκι του πνευματισμού. Τίποτα
δεν θα μπορούσα να σκεφτώ που να εξηγεί
την έκπληξη και το κλάμα σου. Εκτός,
ίσως, αν είχες πιάσει κάποιον ψίθυρο που δεν άκουγα,
πριν το ποτήρι μας κινηθεί, κάποια ακίνητη, γαλήνια φωνή:
‘Η δόξα θα’ ρθει. Δόξα ειδικά για σένα.
Η δόξα δεν μπορεί να αποφευχθεί. Κι όταν φθάσει
θα έχεις πληρώσει γι’ αυτήν με την ευτυχία σου,
τον σύζυγό σου και την ζωή σου’».

[Tom Bensley · Rating 5 out of 5]

My last review for a book of poetry (Plath's Ariel) was only a few lines long. Perhaps it was because I was tired, I'd just written another review or, the more plausible, I was scared of reviewing poetry. Poetry is not something you casually bring up with your mates after a few beers or during a penniless poker game because chances are that they couldn't care less. Or, you just don't want to sound like a fool. My reason was the latter. I was convinced that to review poetry one is required to have a fancy vocabulary and mention lots of literary terms you can't even imagine the poets themselves understanding. It's a real shame poetry has such an exclusive reputation, because that goes against all the reasons poetry exists.
Poetry is written to engage the reader's feelings and cause them to be swept up in words that were born to be put next to each other. The sentence rhythms, rhymes and repition all work to bring the metaphoric imagery away from the page to be interpreted by each individual reader. It's the most free form of reading (possibly of writing too, but that's debatable) and yet it only seems to cater to a few. People just don't know how to have fun with poetry.
Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters isn't necessarily a fun read, but it is powerful. The relationship between he and Plath is complicated, long and tragic. I guess this is much like any relationship, but here it's being told by a poet, so shut up and listen. Hughes describes the emotional turmoil that Plath suffers while he is like a bystander, calling out a few words of advice that get drowned out by the shouts of the players in and around Plath's own head.
Many readers like to pick a side when looking at each poet, choosing who the victim was and whther Plath killed herself because of Hughes. If you're seeking some kind of answer, BL is not the place to look for it. What you are given is a heart-wrenchig, at times eerily cold and breathtaking account of love and all its struggles.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this alongside the Feinstein biography of Hughes, which was illuminating. i'd recommend doing the same as it helps place the locations and events that inspired the poetry. The collection is raw in places and reflective in others, frequently nail-on-the-head brilliant. He's a poet who teaches that the big fancy words aren't what's always needed ('wet shops' - God, can you think of a better description of Yorkshire? - 'the canteen clutter of the British restaurant'- this is pre-coffee shop time!) but nevertheless his writing makes the reader really FEEL. My favourites were Suttee ('it's the only thing I want'), A Short Film (a photograph is taken - not intended to rend or hurt. Not intended as a fuse or a weapon), Inscription, Totem, Dreamers (about meeting Assia), Robbing Myself ('you never knew how I listened to our absence')....I could go on. But I'll leave it there.

[Courtney Kellner · Rating 4 out of 5]

The freezing soil
Of the garden, as I clawed it.
All around me that midnight's
Giant clock of frost. And somewhere
Inside it, wanting to feel nothing,
A pulse of fever. Somewhere
Inside that numbness of the earth
Our future trying to happen.
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.

[Zoë Danielle · Rating 3 out of 5]

"A new soul, still not understanding,
Thinking it is still your honeymoon
In the happy world, with your whole life waiting,
Happy, and all your poems still to be found."

In Birthday Letters Ted Hughes offers 88 responses to Sylvia Plath in chronological order, beginning when he first met her, following her 1963 suicide and the years after as he raised their two children amidst the legend his wife left behind following her early death. Although I knew both Plath and Hughes were poets, I had never managed to read any of his writing despite having loved Plath's poetry since I was a young teenager. I began Birthday Letters with both a lot of resentment towards Hughes for, among many things, destroying the diaries of Plath's final years. However I was also curious about a book Hughes published after thirty years of silence on Plath's suicide, as well as the insight it might offer into their tumultuous relationship.

Most of the poems are well written, articulate and precise description, careful word choice. Birthday Letters is hard to fault from a linguistic standpoint- it is when it comes to the emotional connection I felt lacking. Considering the premise of the book, this is literally a book of poems written to a wife who killed herself, they felt distanced and cold. The top layer of beauty was there, but underneath many of them lacked the intensity of feeling I expected and wanted from the book. This is not universally true of course, there are gems of poems with sharp glittering edges which slice through the celebrity and several decades worth of rumours to tell the reader what life for Ted and Sylvia was really like. In one of my favourites, "18 Rugby Street" he writes:

"In the roar of soul your scar told me-
Like its secret name or its password-
How you had tried to kill yourself. And I heard
Without ceasing for a moment to kiss you
As if a sober star had whispered it
Above the revolving, rumbling city: stay clear."

Unfortunately whether or not it was the intent, there is also a lot of blame laid on Sylvia, a woman who apparently hated England, was fated for death, vicious and was ruled by her relationship with her father. Although I am appreciative of Hughes' honesty and I recognize the fact that this is simply one side of an awfully complex story, but the fact is that his tone often made me dislike him even more. Perhaps this dislike contributed to my inability to read more than a few poems at a time, but when I compare Birthday Letters to Ariel (which I have devoured multiple times) I find it even more lacking. Ultimately I found Birthday Letters valuable for the undeniable insight into the complex Ted/Sylvia dynamic it provides, as well as several truly lucid beautiful pieces but its inconsistency and its tone of judgment left me wanting for the powerful emotional connection that defines good poetry for me. ***

[Alice-Elizabeth (Prolific Reader Alice) · Rating 3 out of 5]

NOTE: I'm really close to a milestone on my Instagram (3,000 followers!) and would love to reach it: www.instagram.com/alicetiedthebookish...

I honestly don't like Hughes as a person, his writing on the other hand is a completely different story... Birthday Letters is a haunting and quite depressive collection of poetry, written after the suicide of his wife (poet Sylvia Plath) taking the reader on a journey into the mindset of a person who is reeling after loss. Some of the poems contained do heavily reflect on depression and suicide, so this may be triggering. The collection as a whole was quick and easy to read. Hughes uses a lot of big words to describe scenes of real-life locations, which at times was complicated to understand but I liked seeing settings coming to life in that sense.

[Willy Schuyesmans · Rating 5 out of 5]

Intrigerend poëtisch getuigenis van Hughes over zijn relatie met Plath. Na haar zelfmoord had hij 35 jaar gezwegen en zich ook niet willen verdedigen tegen de vele publicaties - vooral vanuit feministische hoek - waarin Plath een slachtoffer werd genoemd van de 'onmens' Hughes. Deze uitgebreide bundel, verschenen in 1998, toont een heel andere Hughes die misschien wel fouten heeft gemaakt, maar heel veel van haar heeft gehouden en die met bovenmenselijk geduld geprobeerd heeft haar (psychiatrische) angsten, haar grillen, haar woedeaanvallen en haar onverwerkte rouw over haar vader het hoofd te bieden.
Na het lezen van Jij zegt het van Connie Palmen is deze bundel - waaruit Palmen uitgebreid geput heeft voor haar roman - een echte aanrader.

[Sarah Allen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Definitely some toxic hot takes and a bit disturbing at times knowing the history of Plath and Hughes, but I can’t lie: his poetry is astonishingly astute.

[Liam O'Leary · Rating 1 out of 5]

Run away from this.
Video Review

[Yona · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel like Plath has become a becon for many women writers, and Hughes is cast as the villain in her life, the man holding the knife. This collection finally gives readers access to his perspective. Through his lens, we see Plath's unpredictability, self-loathing, and the pressure she put on him: he was her lightning rod. In particular, I loved his verson of the Rabbit Catcher, as that is my favorite of Plath's poems, and his take on it brings the story to fascinating new light. I enjoyed the way Hughes borrowed some of Plath's imagery, but I liked his own even more. That said, this is a difficult volume to get through: there's not exactly a whole lot of happy. I'd been hoping for a little more happy, because I know they did love each other for a reason and I wanted a reminder of that, but at the same time I understand the reason for the emotions in these poems and I don't criticize that. Perhaps it's the pace I read these poems, one right after another, but many of them did run together for me into one congealed blob of she-died-chasing-her-daddy-and-I-feel-guilty-for-not-knowing-how-to-stop-her. Hughes also favors longer poems, and it cna be difficult to bear through three pages of sustained pain. Others, such as The Shot and The Dogs are Chewing on Your Mother's Body are crisp and stricking in my mind. Hughes was poet laureate for a reason--he's good. I enjoyed Birthday Letters, and it made me want to explore his other poems.

[Megan · Rating 2 out of 5]

*uni read

this man plays the victim in quite literally all of his poems and then has the audacity to distance himself not only from his wives suicide but also his children by calling them 'yours' instead of 'ours' or 'mine'.

the minotaur is such a sinister poem when compared to his other pieces it kinda comes out of nowhere and it's full of hatred and anger, and then of course it goes back to him trying to garner pity from the reader.

this is just a glorified memoir about ted hughes rewriting the narrative around him and his wives relationship, and then forcing the reader to pity him through his victim mentality.

i will give him points for his pieces being very easy to read, but they don't really carry any depth to them. so i guess it's kinda the only slight positive for both this collection and this man.

[Ygraine · Rating 3 out of 5]

maybe one day i will revisit these poems with a more comprehensive biographical knowledge. maybe one day i will join the mythological dots to form a constellation of further meaning that i cannot, at this moment, with my fragmented and disjointed understanding fully discern. maybe one day i will approach these poems as things to be understood, rather than experienced. but not this time, my first time reading them. i have gathered only impressions, brief glimpses of memory, resonating with guilt and sadness and feverish intensity, patterns and images of myth and superstition woven into human life.

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

And your words
Faces reversed from the light
Holding in their entrails.

It's been a while since I liked a book of poetry, so of course it had to be one so fraught with tension in the literary world. Granted, I should theoretically be feeling some of that tension too, given the review of The Bell Jar I put out during a particularly tenuous part of my life. However, that part was a while ago, and if there's anything coming out as queer and being a union steward has taught me, it's that, if all your fury goes into white feminism, that's a really superficial place to be stuck at. In any case, looking back at my status updates, the poems that stood out to me were "The Tender Place," "Karlsbad Caverns," and "The Beach." However, there was also "Chaucer" with the serenaded cows, "Flounders" with poetry's sister, "The Badlands" with: When Aztec and Inca went on South / They left the sun waiting, / Starved for worship, raging for attention, / Now gone sullenly mad. Like many linguistic evocations that fit my fancy, there's a blithely handled heft to the rhythm, like an axe you give a twirl or two to before torquing it into wood or flesh, depending on whether you want to rhyme it true or tell it slant. As for the themes, the mythos of the 20th c. Lucia Di Lammermoor did get rather dull at the end, but if my peering-through-my-fingers watching of HBO's "Interview with the Vampire" says anything, it's that I haven't entirely lost my taste for the morbid so long as it's done with style. All in all, here's a work that has so seeped into certain sectors of the public conscious that it can afford to go full minimalist in the blurbs and the bios and the lack of foot/endnotes and still gets its contextualized point across enough to drum up the sales. The rest is conjecture and noise and publishing deals, and only time will tell whether I liked this work enough to bother with any of the others churned out by this horror show of a literary scene.

Those bats had their eyes open. Unlike us,
They knew how, and when, to detach themselves
From the love that moves the sun and the other stars.

[R. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Picked this up at the library after viewing the 2003 biopic Sylvia starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig as Literature Kingdom's second-best star-crossed angel-handed demon-scratched lovers. Very intriguing how again and again Hughes fetishizes Plath's apple-pie-eating, horseback-riding blonde-tall-muttmix Americaness as some sort of alluring alien Otherness: we in the New World might as well be stepping down from a hovering silvership when we (she, really, she, pretty Plutonian Plath) visit(ed) The Continent (Fulbright scholarship). And? And the descriptions of the American landscape are almost Martian - Hughes' frantic nightmare of Yellowstone Park is, y'know, ha: Edgar Rice Burroughsian man-vs-beast. Stunning, stuff, though, this chap's chapbook.

ASR bookmark review: With rich imagery and symbolic clarity Hughes explores and redefines the historical contours of his marriage to Bell Jar author Sylvia Plath. Readers seeking to enjoy just a few of these poems should consider "Ouija" (pg. 53), "The 59th Bear" (pg. 89) and "The Rabbit Catcher" (pg. 144). [821.914 HUG]

Prize selection: Knitted Afghan

[James Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a reread. I've read a lot of Hughes in the 10 years since I first read it, his poetic memoir of his and Plath's life together. Enjoyed it more, I think, saw more in it, being 10 years improved as a reader. Some of these poems are beautiful. Some are powerful. One or two are elegant. Many of them see their relationship in cosmic terms, a treatment I like a lot. Toward the end they spiral into the surreal as if they follow the arc of her madness. Like everyone else I was gobsmacked by Ariel, the poems she wrote during her last fall and winter. But all the years since we've been reading Hughes and now recognize his talent as vaulting, cathedral-sized. Birthday Letters is some of his best work.

Rereading in conjunction with the Jonathan Bate biography of Hughes.

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Birthday Letters are deliberate and often dense. The memories are often monuments. The weight of time and often judgement arrests the lyrical tide. These pauses offer space to consider. Is there a culpability drifting across the pitch like an errant mist? If there is, then each of must face similar drifts. Bears was my favorite, I imagined Sylvia and Ted on their American road trip akin to Humbert and Dolores. There was never one sock—-only Daddy. Aztecs and crematoria are but tributaries from that initial scowl.

[Karlo Mikhail · Rating 1 out of 5]

In general I find Ted Hughes an abominable figure and this aestheticized denigration of Sylvia Plath distasteful. Most unfortunate is the fact that Plath can no longer speak for her side, having committed suicide decades after this collection's publication.