Word: birthdaying
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After extensive lobbying, my birthday has been declared a University holiday, my blockmate happily announced when he realized that Feb. 16 was a day off. As many Harvard students probably did not realize, this past Monday was Presidents' Day, a national holiday that honors the contributions of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln...
...bust cycle has been operating, no one really knows. Finding out might seem to be a hopeless task, considering that the phenomenon was discovered only about a century ago by Peruvian fishermen. (It was they who called it El Nino, the Spanish name for the Christ child whose December birthday marks its peak.) But last fall, Columbia University oceanographer Richard Fairbanks was floating in the equatorial Pacific gathering data that could tell researchers about El Ninos going back thousands of years. Working aboard the research vessel Moana Wave, Fairbanks spent weeks at El Nino's very epicenter, a patch...
When a new book of poems makes front-page headlines on both sides of the Atlantic, chances are that the reason for such a hubbub lies somewhere outside the realm of aesthetic appreciation. That is certainly the case with Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 198 pages; $20). Although Hughes, 67, Britain's poet laureate since 1984, commands a wide and respectful audience among readers of serious contemporary poetry, the appearances of his books have not, until now, been stop-the-presses affairs. What makes Birthday Letters different is its subject matter: Hughes' poetic meditations on his marriage with...
...Birthday Letters answers that question, but not in a way that is likely to satisfy those looking for gossip or breast-baring confessions. The 88 poems assembled here--all but two of them, The Pan and The Inscription, addressed to Plath as "you"--combine to form an often harrowing and poignant narrative in which the central characters are doomed to their fates before the story begins...
This argument is established early in Birthday Letters, when Hughes records meeting Plath, a Fulbright scholar, at Cambridge University in 1956: "I was being auditioned/ For the male lead in your drama." A tempestuous courtship soon gives way to an equally stormy marriage: two ambitious poets--one English and reserved, the other American and outwardly exuberant but secretly troubled--yoked together in an initial ecstasy that eventually subsides into mutual misery. Hughes, in his telling, learns that Plath has brought problems along with her "long, perfect, American legs." He becomes acquainted with her "homicidal/ Hooded stare," her "dybbuk fury...