Birthday Letters: Ted Hughes

Birthday Letters: Ted Hughes

by TedHughes (Author), Ted Hughes (Author)

Synopsis

Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters are addressed, with just two exceptions, to Sylvia Plath, the American poet to whom he was married. They were written over a period of more than twenty-five years, the first a few years after her suicide in 1963, and represent Ted Hughes's only account of his relationship with Plath and of the psychological drama that led both to the writing of her greatest poems and to her death. The book became an instant bestseller on its publication in 1998 and won the Forward Prize for Poetry in the same year.

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More Information

Format: paperback
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published:

ISBN 10: 0571194737
ISBN 13: 9780571194735
Book Overview: Birthday Letters is Ted Hughes's bestselling collection of poems exploring his marriage to Sylvia Plath.
Prizes: Winner of T S Eliot Prize 1999 and Whitbread Book Awards: Book of the Year 1998 and Whitbread Book Awards: Poetry Category 1998 and Forward Poetry Prize 1998 and Forward Poetry Prize: Best Collection 1998.

Media Reviews
An extraordinary book . . . [Hughes's] subject is Plath herself--how she looked and moved and talked, her pleasures, rages, uncanny dreams, and many terrors, what was good between them and where it went wrong. -A. Alvarez, The New Yorker
The critics who are urging us to regard these poems as masterpieces are right. Their intensity of feeling, the clarity of their imagery, the precision, energy, simplicity, and fluidity of their language are still striking. -Paul Levy, The Wall Street Journal
An emotional, direct, regretful, and entranced [tone] pervades the book's strongest poems, which are quiet and thoughtful and conversational. -Katha Pollitt, The New York Times Book Review
Most of the poems in Birthday Letters have a wonderful immediacy and tenderness that's new to Hughes's writing, a tenderness that enables him to communicate Plath's terrors as palpably as her own verse, and to convey his own lasting sense of loss and grief. . . . They sho
Author Bio
Ted Hughes (1930-1998) was born in Yorkshire. His first book, The Hawk in the Rain, was published in 1957 by Faber and Faber and was followed by many volumes of poetry and prose for adults and children, including The Iron Man (1968). He received the Whitbread Book of the Year for both Tales from Ovid (1997) and Birthday Letters (1998). He was Poet Laureate from 1984, and in 1998 he was appointed to the Order of Merit.