Birthday Letters

Out of the memories of his anguished marriage to poetic genius Sylvia Plath, who killed herself in 1963 at the age of 30, Hughes sculpted an extraordinary collection of poetry, which he launched only months before he died in 1998. The 'letters', 88 in all, house unassimilated, unpoeticized experiences of intense pain through which violent imagery sends shock waves. We read this terrible saga on many levels - as an 11th-hour testimony in a literary cause celebre; as a writer's deepest imaginative concerns published after decades of self-censorship; as a chilling account of a marriage that was baffled and painful from the start. Birthday Letters was awarded the 1998 Whitbread Prize. (Kirkus UK)