Forty-Five: Poems

by Frieda Hughes

The daughter of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes looks back on forty-fiveyears of loves, losses, pain, hope and joy in this revealing poetrycollection.

Breaking forty-five years of near-silence on the subject of her life,Frieda Hughes finally opens up through the medium she knows best --poetry. In this extraordinary collection of personal poems, she takesthe reader step-by-step through the difficult and inspirational eventsthat defined each year of her life, and which she encapsulates here. Weshare her pain through her mother's suicide, her fight against bulimia,three marriages, losing her father to cancer, and an apparentlyinsurmountable breakdown in the relationship with her stepmother. In theface of so much grief, she also shared her successes, her love, and herultimate triumphs as an accomplished poet and painter. As she growsolder, her narrative unfolds to show a complex life beautifully renderedin her poetry.

Hughes is a master of powerful, moving, and vivid language, as seen withthe critical success of her past collections, Wooroloo and Waxworks, andnever more so than now, as she takes on the topics of life, love, loss,and family. For any love of poetry or for anyone who wants to know whathappened in the life of Frieda Hughes after she so tragically lost hermother, this book is the answer.

Genres: Poetry

108 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

Frieda Hughes is an English poet and painter who has spent much of her life in Australia. She has published seven children's books and four poetry collections. She is the daughter of the poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.

Reviews

[Diana Long · Rating 5 out of 5]

Frieda uses non-rhyming, simple poetry or free verse poetry in this work. I so wished it was published with the paintings as well as the poetry to represent the first 45 years of her life. The poetry is very revealing, it doesn't appear that her step mother held any motherly love for her and it comes out in her work and is sad. I thought it was a worthwhile read and would recommend.

[Dna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really enjoyed Wooroloo, but found Forty-Five: Poems to be stilted and bland.

I'm not sure Hughes has much to write about beyond her familial pains. In Wooroloo, we hear Hughes cry at the masses fingering the "mental underwear," but does nothing with her writing to encourage readers to see her as a poet independent of her biography. It's just more of the same. There were some interesting references to Hughes' aunt, the formidable Olwyn Hughes, but none to Assia Wevill and Hughes' half-sister (daughter of Assia and Ted Hughes), Shura, a interesting and under-exposed aspect of Frieda Hughes' biography.

I guess you could accuse Plath of the same thing: mining her life and relationships for material (something her peers and close relations held against her). However, Plath had a fire and ear for language that Hughes is lacking.

An interesting bunch of poems for fans of Plath, Ted, or Frieda herself, but it stands weaker when compared to the Wooroloo collection.

[Ena · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting subject matter. Solid consistent tone. A few spectacular lines and passages. These were balanced with overused similes, and those lines were consistently the weakest. Also, the mouth feel and cadence was sometimes off.
I read the entire collection aloud and each poem twice in succession, so I’ve done my due diligence.
The revelation in this collection is not how the absent mother, Sylvia Plath, impacted this child but how the present stepmother, Carol Orchard, did. Additionally, how incapable the teller is of checking her reality of her father with his actions.
The poems consider deeply the subject of love. Those of her middle twenties and later evidence that she believes love occurs many times before its time. An idea which I’ve no resistance to, and one she persists in advancing throughout the entire collection. However, I found her idea of ‘the one’ troubling and childish for an adult.
Here, I tend to think that perhaps she doesn’t know any love or stability during her childhood, so she’s incapable of recognizing some basic concepts. Perhaps, she terms these men ‘love’ as a matter of choice or chance or habit, but what they are really is abusive wastrel bastards.
Frieda slips from life to life with ease, although they are not easy lives. She changes men and selves like changing into a new jumper. She marries often, but the lives are always the wrong and short lived, and the men she chooses always take advantage of her.
She searches. An unceasing quest for love or distraction from not obtaining love, until Lazlo. In him, she finds her one, and this searching pattern ends for a man but continues in all other aspects of her life. Their multiple houses and remodels and moving constantly.
I enjoyed learning about Frieda Hughes’ life, though it is quite like any other life for all the sensationalism her parentage might lead you to expect. Her writing style is straightforward and honest with a few notable discrepancies of perception.
On that note, I would like to preface this next critique with: I think the collection is meant to be this way. However, she is only concerned with her own emotional perception, instead of getting at deeper truths, and that preoccupation makes this collection weaker.
There is a lack of personal reflection and refusal to identify similar patterns of behavior in relation to men and her family which always affected her life negatively. In short, she disappoints me.
Her childhood lack of reflection doesn’t bother, but when the poems hit adulthood, that’s when the lack of culpability for her own decisions begins to irk.
Not to mention, she has an absolute inability to come to terms with her father’s role in her stepmothers emotional abuse.
There’s no mention of the troubling motif of her father’s neglect or culpability.
She absolves her father and solely blames her stepmother, but the truth is that Ted Hughes willing gave his power for the care and keeping of his children over to an uncaring pseudo parent who controlled and dominated Frieda’s childhood with callous disregard.
This pattern continues for Frieda’s entire life until she is ultimately broken with by Carol after Ted’s death. Frieda allows Carol to emotionally abuse her well into adulthood without ever being able to act in her own best interest.
I would not wish to live in her mind. The lack of reason startles as much as it debilitated. Likewise, I would not wish to have her life, which is so related to her perceptions and temperament.
I pity her inability to disassociate herself with her upbringing and negative family. She possesses no positive coping mechanisms to deal with her situation and seems quite an unhappy person who binds herself to the idea of ‘true’ love instead of self love to achieve happiness and fulfillment.
A proponent of the inevitable. That’s the impression of her that’s left in my mind.
There’s struggle with some growth and little resolution except in fictitious concepts of a home haven and true love, and those concepts end the collection.

[Jacqueline West · Rating 2 out of 5]

Admittedly, my interest in Hughes is based more on her lineage than on her own work, but this collection is disappointing on both counts. Her style is awkward and full of weak images; these poems are so openly self-obsessed that they leave no point of entry for the reader.

[Inopia · Rating 4 out of 5]

i find it horrifying that some reviews’re comparing her to her dead mother. hope you know that you're disgusting.

«They are killing her again.
She said she did it
One year in every ten,
But they do it annually, or weekly,
Some even do it daily,
Carrying her death around in their heads
And practicing it. She saves them
The trouble of their own;»

«The filmmakers have collected
The body parts,
They want me to see.
They require dressings to cover the joins And disguise the prosthetics
In their remake of my mother;
They want to use her poetry
As stitching and sutures

To give it credibility.
They think I should love it -
Having her back again, they think
I should give them my mother's words
To fill the mouth of their monster,
Their Sylvia Suicide Doll,
Who will walk and talk
And die at will,
And die, and die
And forever be dying.»

[MaryJo Hansen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Frieda Hughes wrote these poems after her 45th birthday and there is one poem in this volume for each year of her life. The subjects she depicts for each poem, the remembrances she shares, are not happy, but full of her truth: fears, desertion, death, confusion, mistakes, betrayals and also successes. Mostly her internal focus made me sad to think that these are her memories of each year.
She is a gifted poet(not surprising considering her lineage) and she also did a a series of paintings to accompany these poems. they are not in this book. Frieda is now 65 and living in Wales and I hope she has found her place in a world that has caused her so much grief.

[Lệ Lin]

The ambiguity often associated with poetry allows Frieda Hughes to express herself freely while sharing the story of her life, ensuring her privacy remains intact. Although I enjoyed reading the book, it is a brief work that only touches on the surface of her experiences. I found myself wishing for a deeper exploration and connection within each poem, as none truly stood out, despite her beautifully handpicked words.

I was also surprised by the insights into Hughes's relationship with her stepmother, which I had not encountered elsewhere. However, the collection seems to lack self-reflection and offers little resolution to the various issues she presents from her life.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

An insightful autobiographical collection. I really admire Frieda for her drive to make art and find meaning and love despite her sad experiences - especially considering the lack of love she was shown as a child. (Her stepmother's behaviors and attitudes are inexcusable.) Her writing style in this collection is a bit direct at times, but it needs to be to get to the point of each year of her life. She still has a very enjoyable poetic style with some standout lines. I plan to read her other collections sometime in the future.

[David]

Not as dense, allusive, or, ultimately, as challenging as I expected, nonetheless Hughes has a voice that is separate from those of her famous parents. I will be interested to compare the paintings which accompany these poems (Blake stirs, rumbling, somewhere). One feels sometimes in reading of the parents' generation that it was, in Shakespearean terms, star-crossed; that impression survives into the generation that is my own.

[Karen Richardson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love what Frieda Hughes writes and this book is as magical as the others.

Also love what she's done in writing a poem for each year...terrific idea that ties together and adds color to what I know of her life.

Hughes mentions a friend in California - perhaps it's the same person as in her later book GEORGE - and this friend should be applauded as well. Both she and Hughes show great empathy (Hughes to a "woman living rat-like" in the poem from her 42nd year).

[Diana · Rating 2 out of 5]

«(…) My days were identical.
I always believed that this brought comfort;
No surprises, no upsets, no questions, just
A slow pace from one end of the day
To the other. (…).»

I really wanted to like Forty-Five: Poems —especially given Frieda Hughes’ background and potential for a distinctive voice— but it ended up being quite disappointing. A few pieces hint at genuine feeling, but most read like first drafts of thoughts that never quite found their shape.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

CN: read her Wikipedia before the book. She's the daughter of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, and this collection is very much about that experience.

It's an incredible concept and collection. I feel privileged that she shared it with us.

[Julia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Revealing, thoughtful, and deeply personal.

[raysilverwoman]

I liked the organizing principle of this book: 45 poems representing 45-years trial and triumph (with 45 astonishing abstract paintings that additionally express each year, as viewable from her website). A real labor of love. I can't imagine going back through each year of my life and mining all the disappointment. I do think that's my overall takeaway from Frieda's poems here: It's labor that moves us between moments of loss and love (so we ought to get to work). So much of that labor goes into mere survival and whatever's left into the desire for love. Life is costly, as Frieda's poems show, but there are rewards gained: insights, dignity, deeper joys. Most of these poetic snapshots read more like prose cut-ups, but there are quite a few unexpected turns of phrase that set a distinct scene. A certain earthy vocabulary here reminded me a bit of Ted Hughes' poetry--even the layout of said poems--but Frieda has a voice all her own, almost childlike in its simple language and short, nursery-like rhymes. (It makes sense that she would write so many children's books.) One feels the private anguish and Sisyphean effort of her life caught under her family's tragedies, too, which is moving. Her vulnerability is commendable. I don't think rating this work's appropriate, really, since it's autobiographical, and most (I assume) are reading it because they want to know about her private life, the poetry basically secondary. There's a vague familial likeness, as it does inherit a genetic emphasis on the will to overcome, the pleasures of nature, on desertion and devastation.

Some lovely lines and sections I highlighted, all from different poems:

"I felt myself
Rolling forwards like a stone
As the plane of the Earth tipped."

--
"Woolaroo took my breath away
As a lover does,
Its dry, sloping fields, its slow stream,
Its boggy bits at the boundary,
Brought stillness to my centre. That first
Intake of breath was continuous."

--
"So I could be single-minded
About the small actions of a day
That were now mountainous.
I grasped my minutes
In semi-conscious fingers,
Fumbling for clarity, each thought
A marble rolled across the floorboards
And stopped in a knothole.
My unfinished ideas littered like spilt jewels,
Forever stuck in their hollows"

--
"Each day arrived;
Another mountain. Each day my tent
Was pitched nowhere near the summit.
My life was quiet. People
Drained me, as if their conversation
Punctured the bucket I swung in
So I'd leak into the hot sand and evaporate."
--

"I took each waking hour as
A thing for which I had
No expectations.
I asked nothing of it.
Poetry, stopped and bottled up a decade,
Poured out. I couldn't read it
But I wrote it down
As fast as my fingers could stumble
Between the two walls
Of sleep and sleep. Without my defences
It was set free.

I was going to find my way around mountains,
I'd burrow holes,
I'd trick myself into attaining
Small goals, each rebuilding a little more
Of the foundation of myself
That had powdered beneath the weight
Of too much expectancy.

--
"He knew that all my other beginnings
Had purpose in preparing me
For endings."

--
"My birth mother's blue plaque
Brought me back from wherever
I'd lost myself, and I saw
No other mother could replace
The one that went before.
No woman would adopt
The child I was,
The girl whose mother's face
Unknowingly accused them
Of taking up her mother's place.
I'll paint my life in abstract now,
These poems as the key
To the incidents that shaped me,
(..)
The mother and father who loved me, died,
But still I carry them inside
And in my quiet, mourn for them."

--

"The electrician and plumber
Working through two summer,
The dust and mayhem
And silly pheasants running, and the rain
Just stunning against the background
Of Lebanese cedar the towered into the sky.
Our work took on new life, as we did.

In the garden I dug up and shifted
Earth and rock, and sculpted shapes
In which I planted flowers, shrubs, and trees,
Cementing rockeries in labyrinths,
Occupying my mind in the moments where
I'd like to leave the painful thing behind.
Even recent history
Could not dampen my ardour
For this, our home.
A place for truth and clarity,
For peace and creativity
At last. Our sanctuary."

[Ilze · Rating 1 out of 5]

If you were hoping for poetry filled with images and symbols the way poets of note write, don’t read Frieda Hughes’ “45 Poems”. These might as well be a list of short stories with the typography of a poem. Writing of a “clash of cymbals” – as Hughes does in her 36th year – is to totally miss the point of finding your lover. Anyone who has any knowledge of the Bible will know that the “clash of cymbals” actually has everything to do with someone who has no love.
Be warned, not disappointed!

[Barb · Rating 5 out of 5]

Frieda Hughes is painfully honest and so eloquent in her poetry. You will be sucked in from the start. The story of her hardships and coming to terms with the heartbreak is inspiring. You can see a subtle similarity to Ted Hughes, her father, which is heart warming. Mostly you will hear Frieda in her raw unique voice. This is very beautifully written.

[Gül Nil · Rating 2 out of 5]

Until I found this book, I have not thought about what might have happened after Plath's suicide which has always seemed the end for me. But as any other events, it was not just the end, but also the beginning/turning point for other people, especially her daughter Frieda. With those poems, she has expressed her feelings and showed how her life has changed sincerely over years.

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

She does some cool things in the poems and it is very interesting hearing her perception on living in the shadow of her mother's success as well as her fathers.

[Molly · Rating 1 out of 5]

Oh boo, I wanted to like it so much.