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
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