Birthday Letters

Format:	Paperback 208 pages

In stock

Usually despatched within 24 hours

RRP £9.99

£6.19

You save: £3.80

Delivered FREE
in the UK

Add to wish list

About this book
Bookseller reviews
Customer reviews

Synopsis

With just two exceptions, these 88 poems, in the form of a narrative, are addressed to Sylvia Plath, the American poet to whom Ted Hughes was married. They were written over a period of more than 25 years, the first a few years after her suicide in 1963. Intimate and candid, they cover the whole period of their relationship, from the first meeting to the aftermath of Plath's death, but are largely concerned with the psychological drama that led to the writing of her finest poems and to her death.

Book details

Published
17/03/1999

Publisher
Faber and Faber

ISBN
9780571194735

Publisher and industry reviews

UK Kirkus review

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)