HUGHES, Ted Birthday Letters. London: Faber and Faber. 1998.
8vo. Original light blue cloth boards with silver title lettering to spine; pictorial dust jacket designed by the author's daughter, Frieda Hughes, pp. [ix], 3-197; very minor scuffing to top head of spine and dust wrapper as well as top edge corner of wrapper; otherwise near fine.
Intimately inscribed just nine months before his death: 'For Nick/With Love Always/from Ted/29th January 1998'.
Published just months before his own death, Birthday Letters is comprised of eighty-eight poems which trace the author's relationship with his wife, the poet Sylvia Plath. Points of significance include their meeting day, relayed in St. Botolph, "I see you there, clearer, more real/ Than any of the years in it's shadow', as well as events prior to their meeting which would go on to have considerable impact on their relationship, such as in 'The Tender Place' which describes electro-convulsive treatment Plath underwent.
After intense public scrutiny surrounding their relationship following her demise, Birthday Letters are addressed, with two exceptions, directly to Plath- with many of the poems written with stark reference to her passing. In 'The Visit', reckoning with the doomed intensity of their love, Hughes concudes, 'You are ten years dead. It is only a story. /Your story. My story.’.
The poems that make up The Birthday Letters were accumulated over a period of more than twenty-five years. It became an immediate bestseller and won the Forward Prize for Poetry in the same year.
As Semaus Heaney would write of the book: '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.'
#2121068