Word: plath
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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 Sylvia Plath...
...years ago this month that Plath, then 30, put her head into a gas oven and committed suicide. Hughes, her husband of a little more than six years, had left her and their two small children for another woman three months earlier. This domestic tragedy might have remained largely private had not Plath, already an established poet, left behind a powerful and searing sequence of poems, published posthumously as Ariel, that ensured her lasting fame. The nascent feminist movement in the '60s enlisted her as a martyr and vilified Hughes as her oppressor and, intentionally or not, murderer...
Hughes' silence about this matter over all the succeeding years puzzled some and infuriated others, particularly since he owned the rights to Plath's writings and admitted destroying and suppressing some of them out of concern for his children's feelings. While censoring some of his dead wife's words, had he nothing at all to say for himself...
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...
...Plath's obsession with her father really bugs Hughes--and you feel...