Word: plath
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Fans were shocked, but unsurprised that he had chosen to keep the illness to himself. This was, after all, a man who struggled quietly for 35 years with the emotions bequeathed to him by the suicide of his first wife, the tortured American poet Sylvia Plath. His refusal to speak out about the 1963 incident in which Plath gassed herself after Hughes left her for another woman had led many to presume that he was hard-hearted, if not a murderer (and they kept hacking his name off her Yorkshire gravestone). That was until the sudden and unassuming launch...
...fortunate. The dust-jacket blurb on her first book of poems, Wooroloo (HarperFlamingo; $20), alludes delicately to the author's "unusual literary pedigree," which only fires curiosity while pretending to discourage it. For Frieda Hughes is the daughter of Ted Hughes, Britain's current poet laureate, and Sylvia Plath, whose stunning confessional poems written just before her 1963 suicide made her posthumously famous and, to many, a martyr-saint in the bargain. The Hughes-Plath story has fueled numerous books and endless, usually acrimonious, debates. Frieda Hughes, 38, grew up as a bit player in an engrossing literary drama...
...write? And although Hughes denies being consciously influenced by the work of her mother and father, traces from both are easy to see. Her mother's violent, lacerating imagery appears in a poem called "Hysterectomy": "My disease will be stripped out/ Like the rotten lining of a leather coat." Plath's angry confessional tone is echoed in "Granny": "You loved me not, just saw/ A copy of the face/ You gave birth to." In "Readers," Hughes rails at those who have made a cult out of her mother: "They turned her over like meat on coals/ To find the secrets...
...time. She was just shy of her third birthday when her mother died and, as she tells TIME in an exclusive U.S. interview, retains only fragmented, "private" memories of their life together. She adds that her father--and this may surprise all the Hughes haters among the Plath defenders--raised her and her younger brother Nicholas with a keen sense of their mother's continuing presence in their young lives. "I grew up thinking of her very much as an angel. Not even so much in death, but also in life. And of course, as I grew older, it began...
Such poems emit a screechiness that Plath's, at their most powerful, avoided. Hughes is more successful when she turns her attention, as her father has done so brilliantly, to the natural world. Here is a fox: "Half grown/ His small feet black as matchheads." Here is a bush fire that consumed much of her property in Wooroloo: "It began with a small red spot/ That flowered in the floorboards,/ Its anemone danced, and the music/ Was the crack of wood applauding." Such moments suggest that poets can be born as well as made...