Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes, Paperback, 9780571194735 | Buy online at The Nile
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Birthday Letters

Poems

Author: Ted Hughes   Series: Faber Poetry

Paperback

Birthday Letters is Ted Hughes's bestselling collection of poems exploring his marriage to Sylvia Plath.

'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 Irish Times

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PRODUCT INFORMATION

Summary

Birthday Letters is Ted Hughes's bestselling collection of poems exploring his marriage to Sylvia Plath.

'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 Irish Times

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Description

'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.The book's contents are unfailingly interesting, but what makes Birthday Letters a poetic as opposed to a publishing landmark is the valency of the poetry itself.The poems give the impression of utterance, avalanching towards vision.' Seamus Heaney, Irish Times

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Awards

Winner of T S Eliot Prize 1999
Winner of Whitbread Book Awards: Book of the Year 1998
Winner of Whitbread Book Awards: Poetry Category 1998
Winner of Forward Poetry Prize 1998
Winner of Forward Poetry Prize: Best Collection 1998

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Critic Reviews

"An extraordinary book . . . [Hughes's] subject is Plath herself--how she looked and moved and talked, her pleasures, rages, uncanny dreams, and many terrors, what was good between them and where it went wrong."—A. Alvarez, "The New Yorker"
"The critics who are urging us to regard these poems as masterpieces are right. Their intensity of feeling, the clarity of their imagery, the precision, energy, simplicity, and fluidity of their language are still striking."—Paul Levy, "The Wall Street Journal"
"An emotional, direct, regretful, and entranced [tone] pervades the book's strongest poems, which are quiet and thoughtful and conversational."—Katha Pollitt, "The New York Times Book Review"
"Most of the poems in "Birthday Letters" have a wonderful immediacy and tenderness that's new to Hughes's writing, a tenderness that enables him to communicate Plath's terrors as palpably as her own verse, and to convey his own lasting sense of loss and grief. . . . They sho

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About the Author

Ted Hughes was born on 17 August 1930 in Mytholmroyd, a small mill town in West Yorkshire. His father made portable wooden buildings. The family moved to Mexborough, a coal-mining town in South Yorkshire, when Hughes was seven. His parents took over a newsagent and tobacconist shop, and eventually he went to the local grammar school.In 1948 Hughes won an Open Exhibition to Pembroke College, Cambridge. Before going there, he served two years National Service in the RAF. Between leaving Cambridge and becoming a teacher, he worked at various jobs, finally as a script-reader for Rank at their Pinewood Studios.In 1956 Hughes married the American poet Sylvia Plath, who died in 1963, and they had two children. He remarried in 1970. He was awarded the OBE in 1977, created Poet Laureate in December 1984 and appointed to the Order of Merit in 1998. He died in October 1998.Ted Hughes's first book, The Hawk in the Rain, was published by Faber Faber.

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More on this 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. - Seamus Heaney Irish Times '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.The book's contents are unfailingly interesting, but what makes Birthday Letters a poetic as opposed to a publishing landmark is the valency of the poetry itself.The poems give the impression of utterance, avalanching towards vision.' Seamus Heaney, Irish Times

Read more

Product Details

Publisher
Faber & Faber
Published
2nd January 2002
Edition
1st
Pages
208
ISBN
9780571194735

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CUSTOMER REVIEWS

17 May, 2021
Perfect gift if you like reading poetry.
By Ric
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Save
23%
RRP $28.00
$21.56
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