Birthday Letters

First edition. 8vo. Pp. [ix], 198. Blue-grey paper boards, stamped in ecru to spine. Jacket art by Frieda Hughes.

Winner of the 1998 Forward Poetry Prize for best collection, the 1998 T.S. Eliot Prize, and the 1999 British Book of the Year award. A New York Times Notable Book of the Year for 1998. Hughes's magnificent riposte, written over a 25-year period, to sundry doubters of the psychic cost engendered by Plath's suicide. Comprising 88 poems, all but two addressed to his former wife, they cover the full span of their relationship, from his first sighting of her as a Fulbright scholar in Cambridge to the aftermath of her untimely death.

The broadcaster and couple's mutual friend, Melvyn Bragg, unearthed drafts of an unpublished "Last Letter" in the British Library with the help of Hughes's widow, Carol, which was then printed on the 11th October 2010 issue of The New Statesman. Confessional, unfinished, and raw in its searing focus on events leading up to her demise, it serves as a haunting coda to the collection.

"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

[Keith Sagar, Ted Hughes: A Bibliographical Supplement 1996–2013, A118]