I wish I could rate it higher, but decades after SP’s death, he’s still writing about her genius furies as if they all bore the name Otto and not Ted. As if her childhood grief absolved him. I lost count of how many times he referenced “Daddy” in the poems about her last days. As long as your daughter’s words can stir a candle.She could hardly tell us apart in the end. But Sylvia had already laid her father to rest in her poems:There’s a stake in your fat black heart And the villagers never lik...

Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. A marriage made in heaven—or in hell? A tempestuous marriage akin to Anthony and Cleopatra. Passion and drama played out on a very public arena. Many will know of the controversial couple, yet perhaps not know Ted Hughes’s poetry.It is Sylvia Plath who has the adulation, the tragic story; committing suicide in 1963, seven years after her marriage to Ted Hughes. At the time I was not aware of this, being a little too young. I did come across Ted Hughes’s poetry as a t...

Given Hughes' notorious reluctance to speak about his volatile marriage to Sylvia Plath, this collection came as a shock when it appeared in 1998. Comprising poems written since Plath's suicide in 1963 this is both intimate and a public dialogue, a way of speaking back to Plath, her poems, and also the world which sometimes turned Hughes into a patriarchal monster of a husband.The best of the poems draw on Plath's own works, re-using her texts, titles, imagery and language to offer Hughes' side

I'm not actually a huge fan of Ted Hughes as a writer.As a human being--whose life and misdeeds are basically publicly property--I have no comment.I like this, I'm almost afraid to say, because it is ugly. Self-justifying and painful and tender and unpleasant. An raw mixture of unspeakable things.

The freezing soilOf the garden, as I clawed it.All around me that midnight'sGiant clock of frost. And somewhereInside it, wanting to feel nothing,A pulse of fever. SomewhereInside that numbness of the earthOur future trying to happen.I look up - as if to meet your voiceWith all its urgent futureThat has burst in on me. Then look backAt the book of the printed words.You are ten years dead. It is only a story.

Ted Hughes has an uncomfortable place in the room where Sylvia Plath killed herself (and another in the room where his next wife, Assia Wevill, killed herself and their only daughter) -- he was the gas, he was the ovens, or he was the mark to which the the dial was turned. Maybe he was the sealed doors. In Birthday Letters he places himself in and around that first room, Plath's room. And those places are horrifying, those he occupies and also those spaces he seems to have to leave empty.

My last review for a book of poetry (Plath's Ariel) was only a few lines long. Perhaps it was because I was tired, I'd just written another review or, the more plausible, I was scared of reviewing poetry. Poetry is not something you casually bring up with your mates after a few beers or during a penniless poker game because chances are that they couldn't care less. Or, you just don't want to sound like a fool. My reason was the latter. I was convinced that to review poetry one is required to hav...

'She and I slept in each other's arms,Naked and easy as lovers, a month of nights.Yet never made love once. A holy lawHad invented itself, somehow, for me.But she too served it, like a priestess,Tender, kind and stark naked beside me' 'The dark ate at you. And the fear Of being crushed. 'A huge dark machine','The grinding indifferent Millstone of circumstance'. After Watching the orange sunset, these were the wordsYou put on a page. They had come to youWhen I did not. When you tried To will me u...

I read this because I am teaching a postwar American fiction class this spring and we are reading Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (and some of her poetry) for the class. I hadn't wanted to read it so much, I hadn't wanted to revisit my anguished feelings about her life and poetry prior to her suicide, but I had given the enrolled students a chance to choose novels from this period, and some of the class wanted to read it, so I added it. Then, I recalled never having read this book by Ted Hughes, her...

I need to get something off my chest with this one. I'd read Birthday Letters a few years ago, I guess when I was first getting into Plath and was not particularly interested in the warzone of the Plath/Hughes legacy. I also didn't really give much thought to poetry at the time--if it was pretty or vaguely shocking, I'd nod and think, 'Well, look how smart I am, for reading this.' So I think I let Hughes off the hook last time--and I should clarify to say that I don't hate Hughes' poetry; I'm no...

I wanted to hate this. I've read enough by Sylvia Plath to know that I love her. I've read enough about her relationship with Ted Hughes to know that I hate him. What bullshit is that?Of course I know nothing about either of them. I know what's been written of their marriage, it's breakdown and the next chapter of suicides in Ted's life. That tells me nothing. What I read in this collection was rawness of love and loss. His side of their relationship. Was it any truer than the accusations that f...

"A new soul, still not understanding, Thinking it is still your honeymoon In the happy world, with your whole life waiting, Happy, and all your poems still to be found." In Birthday Letters Ted Hughes offers 88 responses to Sylvia Plath in chronological order, beginning when he first met her, following her 1963 suicide and the years after as he raised their two children amidst the legend his wife left behind following her early death. Although I knew both Plath and Hughes were poets, I had neve

NOTE: I'm really close to a milestone on my Instagram (3,000 followers!) and would love to reach it: www.instagram.com/alicetiedthebookish... I honestly don't like Hughes as a person, his writing on the other hand is a completely different story... Birthday Letters is a haunting and quite depressive collection of poetry, written after the suicide of his wife (poet Sylvia Plath) taking the reader on a journey into the mindset of a person who is reeling after loss. Some of the poems contained do h...

Ted Hughes wrote Birthday Letters across his life and published it shortly before his death. Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath had once been married and divorced before Plath committed suicide. This anthology of poetry is as a result a collection of poems addressing Plath as 'you' like a letter, a response to her Ariel (as seen in the references to 'ariel' and 'bees' in various poems. One problem of criticism of the poetry however, is a criticism that haunts many books unfairly. That this is merel...

Ugh, what a chore this was to get through. I've read random Hughes poems before and have liked them, so I was surprised and disappointed that I did not like this collection--at all. Where to begin? Maybe with "You had a fever. You had a real ailment." This was the condescending tone that Hughes employed throughout many of his poems. I am sure he had a very complicated relationship with Plath, and being involved with someone with mental illness is very challenging (and I can imagine the anger I'd...

If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review.Black Thread: “Birthday Letters” by Ted Hughes(Original Review, 2002)Hughes acknowledged he repressed his own feelings for many years after Plath’s suicide. The poems he wrote before his death, “Birthday Letters”, were an outpouring of these feelings about his love for Plath. It was a top seller. If Hughes had published them as a younger man it would have helped his development as a great poet, but due to the repression, it did him unt...

Ugly and skinned-meat in the way only an abusive man could write. Flayed skull and peeled-back flesh. Anyway, here's one of Sylvia's poems:PURSUITDans le fond des forêts votre image me suit. RACINE.There is a panther stalks me down:　One day I'll have my death of him;　His greed has set the woods aflame,He prowls more lordly than the sun.Most soft, most suavely glides that step,　Advancing always at my back;　From gaunt hemlock, rooks croak havoc:The hunt is on, and sprung the trap.Flayed by thorns

I read this alongside the Feinstein biography of Hughes, which was illuminating. i'd recommend doing the same as it helps place the locations and events that inspired the poetry. The collection is raw in places and reflective in others, frequently nail-on-the-head brilliant. He's a poet who teaches that the big fancy words aren't what's always needed ('wet shops' - God, can you think of a better description of Yorkshire? - 'the canteen clutter of the British restaurant'- this is pre-coffee shop

Run away from this.Video Review

maybe one day i will revisit these poems with a more comprehensive biographical knowledge. maybe one day i will join the mythological dots to form a constellation of further meaning that i cannot, at this moment, with my fragmented and disjointed understanding fully discern. maybe one day i will approach these poems as things to be understood, rather than experienced. but not this time, my first time reading them. i have gathered only impressions, brief glimpses of memory, resonating with guilt