Name: Birthday letters
ISBN: 9782070464562

Ted Hugues

Quelques mois avant sa mort, Ted Hughes (1930-1998), l'un des plus grands poètes anglais du XXe siècle, publie Birthday Letters, un recueil de lettres-poèmes adressées à son épouse l'écrivain Sylvia Plath, disparue trente-cinq ans auparavant. Accusé - parfois violemment - d'être responsable du suicide de la jeune femme, Ted Hughes avait toujours gardé le silence, refusant d'évoquer les sept années de leur vie commune. On découvre avec Birthday Letters qu'il n'a jamais cessé d'écrire à Sylvia, s'efforçant de garder intacte sa présence, se heurtant à l'incertitude des souvenirs, et à la hantise du «futur» qui les attendait et qu'ils n'auront pu vivre. Lors de sa publication en Angleterre et aux Etats-Unis, Birthday Letters a été vendu à plus de cinq cent mille exemplaires, événement sans précédent dans l'histoire éditoriale de la poésie.

Birthday letters

Ted Hughes

Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters are addressed, with just two exceptions, to Sylvia Plath, the American poet to whom he was married. They were written over a period of more than twenty-five years, the first a few years after her suicide in 1963, and represent Ted Hughes's only account of his relationship with Plath and of the psychological drama that led both to the writing of her greatest poems and to her death. The book became an instant bestseller on its publication in 1998 and won the Forward Prize for Poetry in the same year. '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 'Even if it were possible to set aside its biographical value . . . its linguistic, technical and imaginative feats would guarantee its future. Hughes is one of the most important poets of the century and this is his greatest book.' Andrew Motion

Birthday Letters

Caellum

I'm biased, so please take this with a grain of salt. But I was bored. The simple fact is the woman Hughes is writing about here, Sylvia Plath, is a far better, more evocative, poet who did far more exciting things than anything he's doing in this collection.  

The past contemporary poet gives an account in 88 poems in letter form of hisromance and the life spent with Sylvia Plath.

Lewis John Fisher

A collection of poetry addressed to Hughes's late wife, poet Sylvia Plath, reexamines the psychological breakdown that led to both some of her greatest poems and to her untimely death. Reprint.

Birthday letters

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