Birthday Letters; - 1st Edition/1st Printing
Language: English
Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1989
- First Edition
- Hardcover
- Used
Seller: Books Tell You Why - ABAA/ILAB, Summerville, SC, U.S.A.Books Tell You Why - ABAA/ILAB
AbeBooks seller since December 3, 2002
Condition: Used - Fine
£ 23.31
Quantity: 1 available
Add to basketItem description from seller
First edition/first printing in Fine condition in alike dust-jacket; In Birthday Letters, Ted Hughes tells the story of a correspondence between two friends, one long-dead and one still living. Beginning with an envelope addressed to the living friend, the letters gradually become more personal, as the living friend recounts their memories of the long-dead friend. The letters are written in a simple, unassuming style, but they are filled with deep emotion. The story is both heartwarming and poignant, and it is a beautiful tribute to the bonds of friendship.; 8vo; FSA.
Seller Inventory # 29134
- Title
- Birthday Letters; - 1st Edition/1st Printing
- Author
- Hughes, Ted
- Publisher
- Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York
- Publication year
- 1989
- Condition
- Fine
- Dust jacket
- Fine
- Binding
- Cloth
- Language
- English
- ISBN 10
- 0374112967
- ISBN 13
- 9780374112967
- Edition
- First Edition; First Printing.
- Seller catalogs
- By Year Of Issue::1980s, Collection Starter::Hundred Dollars or Less, First Editions, Poetry, The Betty Anderson Collection
"Synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
Review
In Birthday Letters we now have Hughes's response to Plath's white-hot mythologising. Lost happiness intensifies present pain, but so does old despair: "Your ghost," he acknowledges, "inseparable from my shadow." Ranging from accessible short-story-like verses to tightly wound, allusive lyrics, the poems push forward from initial encounters to key moments long after Plath's death. In "Visit," he writes, "I look up--as if to meet your voice / With all its urgent future / that has burst in on me. Then look back / At the book of the printed words. / You are ten years dead. It is only a story. / Your story. My story." These poems are filled with conditionals and might-have- beens, Hughes never letting us forget the forces in motion before their seven-year marriage and final separation. When he first sees Plath, she is both scarred (from her earlier suicide attempt) and radiant: "Your eyes / Squeezed in your face, a crush of diamonds, / Incredibly bright, bright as a crush of tears ..." But Fate and Plath's father, Otto, will not let them be. In the very next poem, "The Shot", her trajectory is already plotted. Though Hughes is her victim, her real target is her dead father--"the god with the smoking gun."
Of course, "The Shot" and the accusatory "The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother" are an incitement to those who side (as if there is a side!) with Plath. Newsweek has already chalked up the reaction of poet and feminist Robin Morgan to the book: "My teeth began to grind uncontrollably." But Hughes makes it clear that his poems are written for his dead wife and living children, not her acolytes' bloodsport. He has also, of course, written them for himself and the reader. Pieces such as "Epiphany", "The 59th Bear" and "Life After Death" are masterful mixes of memory and image. In "Epiphany", for instance, the young Hughes, walking in London, suddenly spots a man carrying a fox inside his jacket. Offered the cub for a pound, he hesitates, knowing he and Plath couldn't handle the animal--not with a new baby, not in the city. But in an instant, his potent vision extends beyond the animal, perhaps to his and Plath's children:
Already past the kittenish
But the eyes still small,
Round, orphaned-looking, woebegone
As if with weeping. Bereft
Of the blue milk, the toys of feather and fur,
The den life's happy dark. And the huge whisper
Of the constellations
Out of which Mother had always returned.
Other poems are more influenced by Plath's "terrible, hypersensitive fingers", including "The Bee God" and "Dreamers", which is apparently a record of Plath's one encounter with Hughes' mistress: "She fascinated you. Her eyes caressed you, / Melted a weeping glitter at you. / Her German the dark undercurrent / In her Kensington jeweller's elocution / Was your ancestral Black Forest whisper--". This exotic woman, "slightly filthy with erotic mystery", seems a close relation to Plath's own Lady Lazarus and the poem would be equally powerful without any biographical information. This is the one, paradoxical, regret about this superb collection--these poems require no prior knowledge, but, for better or worse, we possess it. --Kerry Fried
"About the title" may belong to another edition of this title.
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