Wooroloo: Poems – Elegiac Verse on Fragile Beauty, Loss, and Transformation Beyond Despair

by Frieda Hughes

Welcome to the meticulously observed world of Frieda Hughes. It is a world of tangible materiality constantly on the brink of change, a world populated with foxes and fire, fathers and lovers, mothers and birdmen--a world that is ultimately combustible, fragile, fearsome, and elegiacally beautiful. Hughes maps the landscape, both within and without, in language possessed of an almost painterly sensitivity and a sublime mastery of craft. The self she depicts is one who is tested by loss, danger, betrayal, and abandonment, yet one who is transformed through experience into a world beyond nihilism and despair a place that makes possible truth, strength of character, and the redemptive power of love.

Genres: Poetry, 20th Century

80 pages, Paperback

Published November 17, 1999

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

[Juliet Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Frieda Hughes is the daughter of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. Wooroloo, published in 1999, was her first poetry collection, with a stunning cover featuring one of her own artworks.

These poems are often, quite frankly, depressing. Beautifully written and with wonderful turns of phrase, but depressing with themes of ageing, destruction and death looming strongly.She has a keen eye for the natural world, but it tends to be a natural world of dead cows, feeding spiders and ominous walruses.

Ted Hughes' Thought Fox prowls through his daughter's Foxes:

He appeared at hte floor-deep window,
A sudden little red thought.

Written soon after bushfires destroyed her studio in Wooroloo, Australia, not surprisingly, fire features strongly as a theme in this collection:

And now I treat blackened saplings
With water drippers and a plastic tube,
As if the land were some mammoth animal
On life-support for a small cat.
And the last leaves of the tallest trees
Have this new death-voice
As their bloodless shells clatter.

(from Fire 1)

Words, which no doubt resonate strongly with everyone who lives in areas that have been devastated by forest fires. An increasingly common occurence.

[Fluffy Singler · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection of poetry by the daughter of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes feels at times like an exorcism of all the demons that Frieda has been dealing with over the decades. You can read her family's biography in the poems, from her grandmother Aurelia to her mother and father. Sylvia Plath's own poetry was a mix of biography and great literature such as Lady Lazarus and Daddy. These poems, like her mother's have a rich imagery to them and so even without knowing Frieda's "backstory," they are good poems in their own right.

[Tristan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection was overall fairly solid, but seemed to be somehow lacking in brilliance. Unlike in her later Waxworks: Poems, in Wooroloo, Hughes makes little to no effort to create a unified feel to the collection of poems. This is not necessarily a bad thing (most collections are just that, collections of independent works), but after her wonderful use of the museum conceit in Waxworks I was hoping for a similar degree of unity from this book.

Like Waxworks, Wooroloo was very hit-and-miss. It had a few truly fabulous pieces, my favorites were "George" and "Birds", but it also had a number of poems that were very poor showings. Pieces like "Walrus" and "Giraffes" tried to function as a kind of allegorical exploration of existence, but fell flat, and Hughes' more personal pieces, like "Granny" and "Readers" tended to feel like conscious imitations of her mother's confessional style, but with an element of petulance (particularly in "Granny") that is not to be found in Sylvia Plath. Others, like "Laszlo" and "Teenager", just seem somewhat pointless but are not redeemed by language.

The language is similarly variable. Sometimes, Hughes' words are undeniably and remarkably iridescent, as in "Tiger": "The black slices on/Auburn red flashes/Like sun splitting thin/Black slate."; "Hysterectomy": "No threads stringing eggs like small beads/Across the bottom of an ice box"; and "George":

His scuttle body, thin as a mantis
Was tied to his twig, and each one
Swung the other. We called to him.
His long, thin load raised itself
Expecting to be wrong.

These moments of perfection occur enough to justify reading the collection, but not enough to hold what it would seem, at first glance, to promise. Some of the poems, particularly those filled with anger and images of decay, fall apart when sound is brought forward. The seeming inattention to the sound of many of the poems deprives them of a great deal of power that may have been otherwise available to Hughes and her discerning eye. The sense that there should be more to many pieces, like "Tiger" damages their success--a poem about a tiger does not need to mean anything beyond an effective capturing of the animal,but lines like "It eats to become/Its father" imply a further theme that Hughes does not quite get around to exploring. This is most true in the animal poems, all of which seem to hint at an intent that is not realized, and in "Nothing". In this very intriguing poem, Hughes makes "nothing" an active participant. but them almost reaches to make a point when she says "Their breath//Is the breath I would give you when nothing/Nothing is a small planet." Hughes is constantly playing with the meanings behind the poems, but often fails to provide enough "stuff" to work with when trying to construct those ideas as a reader.

All in all, Wooroloo is a good, but deeply flawed collection of poems. It has some moments of genius and a few absolute disasters, but it is, for the most part, a collection of poems that "almost were". This makes it a reasonably enjoyable, but also frustrating read.

[Lindsay · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this collection of poems by Frieda again recently. I heard her read it when I was at Smith College as a freshman. Frieda is the daughter of Sylvia Plath and Tom Hughes. My favorite poem in it is Readers. It is about her mother, her mother's death and how personal and, in some aspect violating the interpretation of her mother's work and death was deciphered by the public. She plays with words in a way that makes me want to be a writer-or, I suppose a writer like her. One of my favorite lines of all time is also from this poem, it is the kind of line you wish you had written once you read it. I liken it to when a musician hears a song, and is moved by a line and thinks, "Damn, that's good-I wish I had written that."

I have many favorite lines in this poem, but one in particular that struck me was: "They fingered through her mental underwear with every piece she wrote."

I know it's simple-and it may not impact you as it did me. But the concept of fingering through one's mental underwear made me realize when the literary world turned Sylvia's work upside down and inside out in an attempt to find meaning and answers, they also did this to her daughter. That isn't a criticism of critics, as their role is to interpret, understand and evaluate writing. But it is a nod to how a poet's work can often be blurred by the life and subjectivity of the reader.

Read this collection of poems if for nothing else but the poem below. It will make you think twice about how the world impacts the children of those who are famous-for whatever reason. It also made me grieve for the loss Frieda endured, and the agony that can come from the interpretation of readers who think they knew her mother.


Readers
by Frieda Hughes

Wanting to breathe life into their own dead babies
They took her dreams, collected words from one
Who did their suffering for them.

They fingered through her mental underwear
With every piece she wrote. Wanting her naked.
Wanting to know what made her.

Then tried to feather up the bird again.

The vulture with its bloody head
Inside its own belly,
Sucking up its own juice,

Working out its own shape,
Its own reason,
Its own death.

While their mothers lay in quiet graves
Squared out by those green cut pebbles
And flowers in a jam jar, they dug mine up.

Right down to the shells I scattered on her coffin.

They turned her over like meat on coals
To find the secrets of her withered thighs
And shrunken breasts.

They scooped out her eyes to see how she saw,
And bit away her tongue in tiny mouthfuls
To speak with her voice.

But each one tasted separate flesh,
Ate a different organ,
Touched other skin.

Insisted on being the one
Who knew best,
Who had the right recipe.

When she came out of the oven
They had gutted, peeled
And garnished her.

They called her theirs.
All this time I had thought
She belonged to me most.


published November 8th 1997 in The Guardian

[Raffy Rillo · Rating 5 out of 5]

The holes that filtered you before,
Like swamp dogs, open mouthed, are sleeping.
Their mud has sunk between your fault lines
And their bed
Rocks at the end of your corridor.
Meat eaten, the bones have dried.
Blood dust has settled like powder
With plaster from the ceiling,
And the tools are silent.
Your blunt end tries to find
A home in my face,
And your sun shines.

[Mandi Hidalgo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really love the language of Frieda Hughes. I honestly didn't even know much about her other than her famous parentage, but I am so glad that I took the plunge into her work. She is absolutely brilliant, both in poetry and painting. I think I found myself a new favorite artist/poet.

[Marie · Rating 3 out of 5]

A few hits, too many misses. Maybe I’m too harsh, I don’t really know.

[Anji M · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful poems, a bit of her lineage shows through but her voice read unique.
"Reader" is definitely a punch in my Sylvia Plath loving gut.

[Ebani]

No rating.

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

I remember my anticipation of reading Frieda's first collection, given her parentage, and I wasn't disappointed. Her style sits squarely between Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, echoing them both.

[Robert Beveridge · Rating 2 out of 5]

Frieda Hughes, Wooroloo (Harper, 1998)

The back cover copy begins, “Welcome to the meticulously-observed world of Frieda Hughes.” I'm not inclined to disagree with that assessment, but I do feel the need to point out that how well one takes information in is relatively irrelevant if one is not skilled at sending that information back out.

“His bald cries echoed in emptiness,
His unspoilt chamber,
Banging on his walls like kindling.

He had not felt the thistle whip,
Or heard a woman cry.
He had not seen his children leave,

Or watched his father die, slowly...”
(“Birdman”)

(You know, they invented this thing called enjambment a thousand or so years ago that's really helpful when writing poetry!) While I give Hughes points for trying—every once in a while a good line or two does float to the surface—this is the work of a writer who needs to spend a good deal more time workshopping before heading back to the world of publishing. **

[Bethany · Rating 4 out of 5]

A poet with a remarkable literary pedigree, her work at once echoes her parents' work and is uniquely her own. I'll be reading more from her sometime.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Better than Dad, perhaps equal to Mom. Very moving work.