The Offers

I've posted two poems from Ted Hughes' collection Birthday Letters (the last poetry volume he published, a year or so before his death) before, my favourites - "Life after Death" and "Daffodils". One of the reasons why I love them best is that the beauty of the language and the emotional impact is there whether or not you know anything about Hughes and/or Sylvia Plath. They work as their own entities, and any information you need to understand them is given in the poems themselves. That's not the case for some of the other poems, whom I love as well, but for slightly different reasons, and will quote from this time. These poems bring Plath to life in a way none of her biographers (imo, as always) have managed. Of course, it's Hughes' version of her, his perspective and his memories, and also his decades long struggle with those memories and the way his own life has become part of a public narrative, but all the same, there is an emotional richness with all its contradictions there, and a physical reality, that I didn't find in the various versions by third and presumably more objective parties. (Unless they were quoting from Plath's diaries and letters.) One of the red threads throughout Birthday Letters is the attempt to get back to Sylvia the living woman as opposed to Sylvia Plath the cult figure; it's a double engagement both with Sylvia's own versions of her life and herself (and she had several - the "I" of the letters is not the "I" of the journals is not the "I" of the poems) and with the public figure. One of the earliest BL poems addresses the moment of reading her journals again, a decade or so after her death.

( Your story. My story. )