Birthday Letters (Paperback, Main)

Out of the memories of his anguished marriage to poetic genius Sylvia Plath, who killed herself in 1963 at the age of 30, Hughes sculpted an extraordinary collection of poetry, which he launched only months before he died in 1998. The 'letters', 88 in all, house unassimilated, unpoeticized experiences of intense pain through which violent imagery sends shock waves. We read this terrible saga on many levels - as an 11th-hour testimony in a literary cause celebre; as a writer's deepest imaginative concerns published after decades of self-censorship; as a chilling account of a marriage that was baffled and painful from the start. Birthday Letters was awarded the 1998 Whitbread Prize. (Kirkus UK)

Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters are addressed, with just two exceptions, to Sylvia Plath, the American poet to whom he was married. They were written over a period of more than twenty-five years, the first a few years after her suicide in 1963, and represent Ted Hughes's only account of his relationship with Plath and of the psychological drama that led both to the writing of her greatest poems and to her death. The book became an instant bestseller on its publication in 1998 and won the Forward Prize for Poetry in the same year. 'To read [Birthday Letters] is to experience the psychic equivalent of "the bends". It takes you down to levels of pressure where the undertruths of sadness and endurance leave you gasping.' Seamus Heaney 'Even if it were possible to set aside its biographical value . . . its linguistic, technical and imaginative feats would guarantee its future. Hughes is one of the most important poets of the century and this is his greatest book.' Andrew Motion

General

Imprint:	Faber and Faber
Country of origin:	United Kingdom
Release date:	2002
Authors:	Ted Hughes
Dimensions:	199 x 130 x 16mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback - B-format
Pages:	196
Edition:	Main
ISBN-13:	978-0-571-19473-5
Categories:	Books > Language & Literature > Literature: texts > Poetry texts & anthologies > From 1900 > Works by individual poets
LSN:	0-571-19473-7
Barcode:	9780571194735

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