Kirjahaku

Welcome to the meticulously observed world of Frieda Hughes. It is a world of tangible materiality constantly on the brink of change, a world populated with foxes and fire, fathers and lovers, mothers and birdmen--a world that is ultimately combustible, fragile, fearsome, and elegiacally beautiful. Hughes maps the landscape, both within and without, in language possessed of an almost painterly sensitivity and a sublime mastery of craft. The self she depicts is one who is tested by loss, danger, betrayal, and abandonment, yet one who is transformed through experience into a world beyond nihilism and despair a place that makes possible truth, strength of character, and the redemptive power of love.

'When your life, and your parental heritage, are the subject of lifelong speculation and intrusion, it is harder to tell your story than it would be for most of us. When you are the daughter of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, your past and your parents get stolen from you on a regular basis and re-worked according to a dozen different dialectics: gossipy, ideological, literary, romanticised, quarrelsome...' 'This is not a plodding autobiography but the internal story, the utterly subjective way in which - if we are truthful - we all remember our own lives. The poems are a string of glittering or alarming moments, a necklace of life. They are, quite simply, the way it felt to her at each time...It is an original way to record your life, this partnership of short lyrics and large canvases; but then it has been an original life. We are privileged to share it' - Libby Purves. Breaking a lifetime's near-silence on her personal story, Frieda Hughes finally opens up in this sequence of 45 poems and pictures, one for each of the first 45 years of her life. Conceived as an integral part of a five-year personal exploration into abstract art, the poems form a complementary narrative on life, love, loss and family which shadows and illuminates the paintings. The resulting artwork is an abstract landscape of her life, 4 feet high and 225 feet long in 45 panels, the images included here with the poems in this book. "Forty-five" takes the reader on a journey through the difficult and inspirational events defining each year. We share her pain through her mother's suicide, her fight against bulimia, three marriages, and the loss of her father to cancer. But in the face of so much grief, she also shares her successes, loves and ultimate triumphs. Publication was to have coincided with the opening of Frieda Hughes' Forty-five exhibition of her paintings (encircling a whole room) in London, but she had to withdraw the book from publication for legal reasons, even though the poems had already been published in the US by HarperCollins in an edition not including the paintings.