Birthday Letters
A poetry collection in which Ted Hughes looks back on Sylvia Plath, love, guilt, memory, and grief.
Work Information
A poetry collection in which Ted Hughes looks back on Sylvia Plath, love, guilt, memory, and grief.
A poetry collection in which Ted Hughes looks back on Sylvia Plath, love, guilt, memory, and grief.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Faber & Faber
- Published
- 2002-01-02
- Pages
- 208 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 13.2 x 1.7 x 20 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780571194735
- ISBN-10
- 9780571194735
- Price
- 3070 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/History & Criticism/Criticism & Theory
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
Ted Hughes (1930-1998) was born in Yorkshire. His first book, The Hawk in the Rain , was published in 1957 by Faber & Faber and was followed by many volumes of poetry and prose for adults and children. He received the Whitbread Book of the Year for two consecutive years for his last published collections of poetry, Tales from Ovid and Birthday Letters . He was Poet Laureate from 1984, and in 1998 he was appointed to the Order of Merit.
Reviews
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The greatest poetry collection of the Twentieth (or any other) Century
I am going to be marking A Level scripts this year, so needed to get onside with all the set texts. In all honest, I wasn't looking forward to this one. Man alive, but was I wrong. This is the most extraordinary collection of poems I have ever read. You don't need to know anything about Hughes and Plath to start reading them, but I am sure that, like me, you will become so engrossed in their relationship that you will be reading these with the tinterweb open alongside you so you can read up on their life together and the subsequent tragedies that befell them. The writing is superb here (much better than anything Plath wrote, in my humble), touching, warm, angry, poignant and beautiful. I am glad I only had to read them and not live them.
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Soul food
I had sporadically read some of Ted Hughes poetry. I bought this book on recommendation and have not been disappointed. The heart-wrenching poems in this collection are overflowing with soul. Each requires a rereading. They are candid splinters of his life with Sylvia Plath. Reading them made me reflect on my own subterranean feelings on the daily insignificances that make up the whole. Here are his memories and experiences with Plath laid bare. I felt almost embarrassed, like a voyeur, privy to the deepest feelings of another human being, who lived, loved and died. So yes, although the poems are full of life, they emphasise mortality. On the strength of this book alone I have purchase Hughes's 'Collected poems'.
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Todos correcto.
El libro llegó el día señalado, se correspondia con lo pedido y el trato de atención al cliente fue rápido y sencillo.
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Ottimo
Perfette condizioni, come da descrizione annuncio.
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Unmissable for the Plath-fan
I purchased this book because I'm a huge fan of Sylvia Plath. Hughes' poems are not as good imo, but unmissable if you want to learn more about their relationship. At least this bundle is.