Birthday Letters - Ted Hughes

Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes ‘ You are ten years dead. It is only a story. Your story. My story.’- Visit p.9 I was fourteen years old when I first read a Sylvia Plath poem. Sat there in GCSE boredom, I finally felt alive. The irony was not lost on me and I spent the next four years living under the glass, hating a man, I have never met. Ted Hughes. Damn Ted Hughes embodied all the men along the way who spurned me. Then I thought that it was time I heard his own words. Birthday Letters is just that. Birthday Letters comprises of eighty-eight poems of surprising candour and raw emotion Some could be as harsh as to suggest ...

I think poetry teaches you something about words that no other form does. It is also my believe that in good poetry – and in particular Birthday Letters – that special connection between writer and reader sparks, and the reader feels less alone than they did before they read the poem as that special connection has shared – fleetingly – what it is like to be a human. I read Crow by the same author a month, or so, before I read Birthday Letters. I was in awe of this mad scientist of language, documenting the botched and fused experiments he performed on words and ideas. Reading Crow often felt like trying to grasp on to the suspended ...

If, like me, you have read quite a number of books and can't possibly state your favourite, then consider this: which book would go with you if you were to become a contestant on Big Brother? Alright, the question is a little ironic in that Big Brother housemates wouldn't read a book even if held at gunpoint (half of them have never heard of Shakespeare). However, if I was struck about the head enough to want to go on Big Brother, then I would probably take with me a copy of Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters. It would probably have to be a new copy as mine is becoming rather tatty. In short, Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters is hard to leave on the shelf. I bought ...