Word: wooroloo
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Most beginning poets don't have to face ravenous public curiosity about their private lives and past histories. Frieda Hughes should be so 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...
...Wooroloo would be an impressive debut coming from any new poet, but the book will be read by many out of plain curiosity: In what manner does a child of those parents 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...
...parents' renown, to keep them private "for the obvious reason that comparisons would be made." Instead, after a period of adolescent turmoil--anorexia, an impulsive and brief marriage to a biker at age 19--Hughes became a painter and an author of children's books. Eventually, she settled in Wooroloo, "a small hamlet, very small," in Australia, to paint landscapes of the stark, almost surreal terrain. And, as it happened, to write poetry that other people might read...
...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...
...happily married to a fellow painter, the Hungarian-born Laszlo Lukacs, Hughes has moved from her property in Wooroloo--the bush fires grew too harrowing--and lives full-time in London. She is pleased to have conquered her own reluctance to appear in print as a poet, despite all the comparisons that await her work. And she wants to concentrate on the future, not her parents' storied past. "I can't ever know the truth," she says of her mother's suicide. "Why would I wish to dwell on it, when there is so much else in life...
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