Kirjahaku

A new collection of unusually intimate poems by the highly acclaimed poet Frieda Hughes, Daughter of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

The daughter of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes looks back on forty-five years of loves, losses, pain, hope, and joy in this revealing and poignant poetry collection"Hughes writes about tragedy with Sylvia] Plath-like wit."--Entertainment WeeklyBreaking forty-five years of near-silence on the subject of her life, Frieda Hughes opens up through the medium she knows best--poetry. In this extraordinary collection of personal poems, she takes the reader step-by-step through the difficult and inspirational events that defined each year of her life, and which she encapsulates here. We share her pain through her mother's suicide, her fight against bulimia, three marriages, the devastating loss of her father to cancer, and an insurmountable breakdown in the relationship with her stepmother.But along with the tribulations, she also shares the happy moments in her life, including her successes, her love, and her ultimate triumphs as an accomplished poet and painter. As she grows older, her narrative unfolds to show a complex life beautifully rendered in her poetry. Hughes is a master of powerful, moving, and vivid language, as seen with the critical success of her past collections, Wooroloo and Waxworks. For any lover of poetry or for anyone who wants to know what happened to Frieda Hughes after she so tragically lost her mother, this book is the answer.

In 1956 Sylvia Plath wrote to her mother, Aurelia Plath: 'I feel I'm developing a kind of primitive style of my own which I am very fond of. Wait til you see. The Cambridge sketch was nothing compared to these.'Sylvia Plath cited art as her deepest source of inspiration but, while her poetry is celebrated around the world, her drawings are little known. This volume brings together drawings from 1955 to 1957, the period she spent on a Fulbright scholarship from the US at Newnham College, Cambridge. During this time she married Ted Hughes and travelled with him to Paris and Spain.First published as a catalogue for an exhibition at the Mayor Gallery, the tiny drawings in pen and ink are exquisitely observed. They include Parisian rooftops, trees and churches.

"Poignant and funny...a passionate book about unconditional love and commitment." --The Washington Post * "Captivating." --Associated Press * "Rich with imagery...It's impossible not to be smitten." --Star Tribune (Minneapolis) From poet and painter Frieda Hughes, an intimate, charming, and humorous memoir recounting her experience rescuing and raising an abandoned baby magpie in the Welsh countryside. When Frieda Hughes moved to a ramshackle estate in the wilds of Wales, she was expecting to take on a few projects: planting a garden, painting, writing her poetry column for The Times (London), and possibly even breathing new life into her ailing marriage. But instead, she found herself rescuing a baby magpie, the sole survivor of a nest destroyed in a storm--and embarking on an obsession that would change the course of her life. As the magpie, George, grows from a shrieking scrap of feathers and bones into an intelligent, unruly companion, Frieda finds herself captivated--and apprehensive of what will happen when the time comes to finally set him free. With irresistible humor and heart, Frieda invites us along on her unlikely journey toward joy and connection in the wake of sadness and loss; a journey that began with saving a tiny wild creature and ended with her being saved in return.

Frieda Hughes’s poems and paintings reflect her early years in Devon and Yorkshire, and her later experiences when living in London, Australia, and most recently, Wales. From childhood, writing and painting have been the two driving forces behind her commitment to life. They first came together in her illustration of two of her seven published children’s books, and through her cartoons – she was cartoonist for the West Australian Magazine when living in Western Australia in the early 90s. In 2002 Frieda Hughes received a NESTA Award to undertake her work on Forty-five, a summary of her life to that age in 45 poems and a 225 foot long, 4 foot high, 45 panel abstract depicting the emotional landscape of her life. This was the beginning of a growing collaboration between her poetry and her artwork, which is now further realised in Alternative Values, which includes 60 full-colour plates of both her abstract and her semi-figurative work. The paintings were shown at the Belgravia Gallery, London, where the book was launched in October 2015. ‘What do we mean to each other and how are we valued? It’s all about perspective; many of these poems explore relationships, attitudes, and how we look back at our childhoods with the eyes of adults, so often having lost that sense of what it was actually like to be a child, when we stumbled into our future with fear, hope or trepidation. Here, I subject my own history and childhood to examination in respect of the way I see others, and myself.’ – Frieda Hughes on Alternative Values

Frieda Hughes's fable-like poems draw on her early years in Devon and Yorkshire, a lifelong engagement with nature and itinerant wildlife, and later experiences when living in Australia, London, and most recently, Wales. They cast light on two worlds, giving a mythic dimension to contemporary life - depicting with an artist's keen eye the particular nature of beast, fish and fowl. Strange creatures, fabled beings and inner voices come to life in startling poems set both in city streets and hospitals as well as in psychic landscapes and reinvented tales. Out of the Ashes brings together work from four collections: Wooroloo (1999), Stonepicker (2001), Waxworks (2002) and The Book of Mirrors (2009). These show a progressive peeling back of the layers of metaphor and allegory as the reader travels a road into a world informed by increasingly personal experiences and memories, through which the poet has been tested, challenged, and found new direction. The book takes the reader on a journey through a life - Frieda's poems examining the ideas of argument, resolution and the acceptance of what cannot be changed. They include poems relating to the death of her father, Ted Hughes, and the loss of her brother Nicholas to suicide at 47, as well as recollections of adolescence following a childhood affected by the loss of her mother, Sylvia Plath. The selection excludes poems from Forty-five (2006), available in the US from HarperCollins, and Alternative Values: poems & paintings (2015), published separately by Bloodaxe.

'He was a hectic, unprincipled bird, but it was impossible not to love him' ... a memoir of love, obsession and feathers