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Summary: "Birthday Letters" and the contradiction of Hughes
Review: Simply put, "Birthday Letters" is not Ted Hughes's best work. It contains some moving poetry, particularly "Life after Death," but overall it is lax and digressive both in form and in content. Many of the poems assume the titles of Plath's own work, but instead of illuminating her, they merely reiterate familiar images. "Birthday Letters" also exposes a contradiction inherent in Hughes himself: while in many of the poems he seems to abrognate responsibility for his wife's suicide by subscribing to the belief that, in a sense, Sylvia was doomed from the start. In his translation of Alcestis, one senses that the character of Admetos is one with whom Hughes identifies: Look what you did: you let her die instead. You live now Only because you let Death take her. You killed her. Point-blank She met the death that you dodged..."Birthday Letters" should not be read biographically, for it is art, not a memoir of Plath or their marriage. To obtain a deeper understanding of Hughes and his marriage, one should read the visionary poetry of Alcestis and Hughes's masterpiece, Crow.
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Summary: A BEAUTIFUL BOOK
Review: Since Sylvia Plath's suicide in 1963, Ted Hughes had been unfairly demonized by Plath's largely feminist following as an unfaithful domineering bully who allegedly drove his wife over the edge. To his credit, Hughes had always kept a dignified distance from his detractors. He finally broke his silence shortly before his own death in 1998 with this beautiful collection of poems which appear in chronological order as letters of reminiscence about their life together, written in reply to Sylvia Plath's published diary account of their marriage. You only have to read Birthday Letters in conjunction with the Journals of Sylvia Plath to realise how deeply Ted Hughes loved and missed his first wife. Touching and heartbreakingly sad, and very moving.
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Summary: a personal testament, for better or worse
Review: Some time ago the popularity of this tome was criticized as being fueled by "the Oprah factor" more than genuine literary interest. But after all, poetry is at its most powerful when the reader can identify with the speaker, and it is probably for the better that we possess the knowledge that makes it possible regarding this collection. Hughes may have been cruel towards Plath, but that is not for us to judge. What is indisputable is that Hughes has retched out every word in terrible agony. It is a heartbreaking testament.
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Summary: Very Powerful
Review: Ted Hughes is a powerful poet. His poems are strong. They remind me of a reading I went to once by Lora Baldwin, who wrote a poem called "Shadows". Very mysterious, just like her. With Ted Hughes you also get that mysterious quality that makes you wonder and not be able to get the poems out of your head. Buy it.
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Summary: A FANTASTIC AND HEART SHAKING LOOK AT A LOVE UNDYING.
Review: Ted Hughes one of the worlds greatest poets takes his work to a whole new plain. Birthday Letters is a beautifully written collection of poems which give true insight into the life, marriage, love and betrayal of Hughes' and plath's relationship. The most interestingly written and ironic poem in this anthology is "pink woolen knitted dress" in which he talks us through the wedding and the memories which he has. He also speaks of the hope in the words of his new wife. She says that she saw heaven open up for them. The poem is ironic but also very emotional and touch as is the whole book.
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Summary: Setting Things Straight
Review: Ted Hughes' "Birthday Letters" is a genuine act of courage and a sacrament of healing. Hughes' voice, strong and tender is at the same time muted and wistful - almost transparent. The poems themselves unfold like gossamer veils between the present and the past. Each one is colorful, vivid with the poet's re-creations of events and the emotional honesty therein, and yet at the same time, harrowingly empty - the sense of an vacant sepulcher. Perhaps, this emptiness is the result of the hysteria over Plath's suicide and the cult that sprung from her image. Many are guilty of robbing both Hughes and their children, Frieda and Nicholas, of the late poetess in a way even more poignant than death itself. In this regard, "Birthday Letters" is in fact, an enormous act of generosity. For all those who would hold Hughes in contempt, he re-creates with astonishing openness the truth of their story. For Hughes and their children, this work resurrects Plath herself - not the myth of Lady Lazarus - but the real woman behind the work, whose method it was to hide her struggles behind mythologizing impulses. "Birthday Letters" is a rebuke to the white-shrouded victim and red-hearted feminist many have misconstrued Plath to be. Hughes rightfully brings to life the flesh and blood wife he once loved. He offers us the sad truth of Sylvia's lost life with its unique cobalt aura, of her courageous voice and its lost blue jewel. In many ways, these poems are as heroic as the "Ariel" poems were for Plath. As a reader and a poet, I can't help but believe that "Birthday Letters" would be the last words Sylvia would want written about her life. - Judy A.F. Johnson
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Summary: Letters to a Distant Present
Review: Ted Hughes, in an essay, said Sylvia Plath's poetry is to his own as knitting a quilt is to a cat pulling on spool of yarn. The statement referred to the creative process as well as the literary construction. The differences are more elemental than this. Ted Hughes' poetry, at it's best, is underground, tectonic and molten; it's propelled by images of Fermi's incubus, cobalt, radioactive lava streaked through with cordite. It is wilderness, and, angry gods. Sylvia Plath's poetry is all craggy shore, whirlpools, mists and grassland, and, a transcendent and implicit Queen of Heaven. It was only the deathly morphology of Ariel which brought the out specter of the antiMadonna to the light of day. A better sense of Hughes poetic skills is perhaps available in his (also Whitbread prize winning) 'Tales of Ovid'. The weight and challenge of responding to his critics (through Sylvia?) seems to have hollowed some, but not all, of the natural exuberance and violence in his work. These are ,after all, love letters. The craft and effectiveness is still very much in evidence here. It is fair, at least, to acknowledge that this rough, dark rock orbiting the celestial sphere is one of massive gravity.
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Summary: It presents snapshots frozen in time.
Review: Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate to Queen Elizabeth II, is the author of more than forty books of poems, prose, and translation. He has received the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and now the W. H. Smith Award for his Tales of Ovid. However, what first brought him into the limelight was the death of his poet wife, Sylvia Plath - an incident that sent shock waves through literary circles in1963 and had all the radical feminists up in arms against the man who had allegedly driven his wife to a self-inflicted death. Ever since, Hughes has been at the centre of controversies. Condemned to live on as a survivor, for many years Hughes wrote nothing but children's verse. At the same time he concentrated on bringing out Sylvia Plath's poems, letters (edited by her mother, Aurelia Plath) and journals. And then, when he did turn back to poetry, not surprisingly, he focused on the negative side of life, the darker forces in the universe which are forever threatening man. He did not write of personal experiences. He did not write of his wife's suicide, or of emotional and other disasters he surely must have suffered. And yet the sense of doom crept into his poetry through symbols from the animal world: the jaguar, the the hawk, and the crow - masks from the world of nature that the poet donned to hide the pain he lived through. Meanwhile the Plath myth has grown. It has all the makings of a cult: the love and the hate, the betrayal and the anger, with the sensationalism climaxing in self-destructive violence. The present volume of poems, Birthday Letters, is very different from the earlier collections. Whereas earlier Hughes liked to assume the role of a sort of wild man of the woods surrounded by his animals and birds, here we have Ted Hughes the man, the husband and the lover, without his mask. These are poems, personal and intimate, addressed to Sylvia Plath, written over a period of thirty-five years following her death. In order to appreciate the poems of Birthday Letters fully the reader needs to be familiar with the life and work of Sylvia Plath. There are at least three crucial biographical facts that cast their shadow on her work: one, the premature death of her father when she was barely eight; two, the separation from her husband, Ted Hughes, in whom she saw a father surrogate; and, three, her suicide attempts, the first unsuccessful one at the age of twenty-one, and the final successful attempt in her thirtieth year. On these major events of Plath's life is based her major poetry, its cries of helpless rage alternating with gloomy despair, its narcissistic concern with the individual self colouring all themes and subjects she chooses to write of. And these are the events referred to repeatedly in the new poems of Ted Hughes. Birthday Poems may thus be considered a companion piece to Sylvia Plath's poetry, offering another understanding of it by filling in the background to poems, to the early days of their courtship and the growing intensity of their relationship. A sense of fatality seems to be an integral part of the relationship, right from the beginning: "Nor did I know I was being auditioned
For the male lead in your drama,
Miming through the first easy movements
As if with eyes closed, feeling for the role.
As if a puppet were being tried on its strings,
Or a dead frog's legs touched by electrodes." A suicide, they say, kills two people - the one who dies and the one who doesn't. As the survivor who didn't, Ted Hughes has silently borne his private hell over the last thirty-five years. This is what the poems testify. But if writing them must have been a painful process, breaking his silence and compiling them for public consumption could not possibly have been easy. And so he speaks of the
"Old despair and new agony / Melting into one familiar hell." Images and themes from Plath's work find their way repeatedly into Hughes' poems. "Sam" refers to the time when Plath's horse (Ariel) ran wild. She had hung on to his neck and returned to the stables in a state of shock. The image of the Hanging God from Plath figures several times and is linked to the Daddy figure that, according to Hughes and other Plath critics, was the harbinger of doom in her life. The arrow symbol of "Ariel," the fixed stars governing one's life, the Bronte countryside, the man in black, the stalking panther, azalea flowers, the works of Giorgio de Chiricio - these are images from Sylvia Plath's work that Hughes draws upon and they all testify that for him she is still a presence that he must live with whether he likes it or not. Perhaps Hughes is trying to exonerate himself. It is not surprising that he talks about Sylvia Plath's life as a struggle to keep in control. Driven by the demons to succeed, she had to pay a heavy price for fame and recognition. In "Ouija," Hughes describes an early premonition of doom:
"Maybe you'd picked up a whisper that I could not
Before our glass could stir, some still small voice:
'Fame will come. Fame especially for you.
Fame cannot be avoided. And when it comes
You will have paid for it with your happiness,
Your husband and your life.'"
Hughes poems are like snapshots frozen in time, best understood by a reader who approaches them without prejudice against the author. They give us the survivor's story of what it was like to be bonded to a brilliant, fiery individual who was to be transformed into a myth, into something of an immortal cult figure, who was destined to live a brief but meteoric life. And who flamboyantly proclaimed that dying was an art: like everything else she did it exceptionally well.
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Summary: A haunting brutal account of shared love
Review: This book was bought as a gift and at first I thought it was a mistake. The pages were so full of pain yet I couldn't put it down. I saw the agony of Ted Hughs' passion and it made me confront the black side of Love. A demanding book.
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Summary: UNBELIEVABLY MOVING COLLECTION OF POEMS
Review: This is one of the finest books of poetry I have ever read. It is painfully personal and true. A beautiful book
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