A Valediction forbidding mourning? (Birthday Letters - Ted Hughes)

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Product:	Birthday Letters - Ted Hughes
Date:	22/01/02 (31 review reads)
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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 that this is the retort to all the criticism heaped upon one man’s shoulders. I feel that this book is more than that; it is a full stop on a relationship that has been the subject of much speculation since Plath’s suicide in 1963.

I first read this book about two years ago, but every month or so I find myself wandering back to its pages. It still touches me as deeply as the first time and that in my mind is a sign of a good book. It still blinds me with its intensity.

People seem to have forgotten that Hughes has lost more than one person to suicide, with his mistress Assia killing herself and their young daughter. I am by no means excusing his adultery, but rather pointing out that loss on that scale must leave scars.

The poems are quintessentially all worth a mention, but I feel that my review of them would do them little justice, as I have struggled to write this many times before, all I can do is urge you to get your hands on a copy and read it with an open mind and heart.

The English graduate in me is tempted to point out all the nuances in this book, but I really feel that it would be as cruel and pointless as pulling the wings off a butterfly.

Those who are used to Hughes’ poetry smile while the rest of us may finally begin to unde
rstand the man.

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