Bloodaxe Books published The Book of Mirrors by Frieda Hughes earlier this month, on 10 October, in the UK.The Book of Mirrors, packaged with Hughes' Stonepicker, was published earlier this year in the US.
There are many poems of interest in this collection to readers of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.
8 comments:
In how many poems does she bitch about people picking over the bones of her mother?
Nice one! More than is necessary, that's for sure.
personally I wouldn't choose a publisher with the horrific name Bloodaxe…
Dear Catty
Why shouldn't she after all this time!
It's a fascinating book and just as personal as her parents' poetry.
I think it's really interesting to look at the use of all the texts : Plath writing about their relationship,Ted Hughes writing on Plath's books, their relationship, specifically in BL, but also in a number of other books and poems, and now Frieda Hughes writing about both.
I thought the poem about the cut out signature poignant
I thought it also poignant that one book is dedicated to her mother ( and Olwyn) and the other section to her father
Bloodaxe certainly is a horrific name-it would be perfectly suitable for a publisher specializing in old Viking literature !
Must say Frieda Hughes' poetry makes my heart sink for all the wrong reasons. She's in an impossible position, this I know and I sympathize. But a lot of her poetry has Hughes' mannerisms-the violence, the guts-without the nuances and the passion and the (ultimate) striving-towards-light which makes Hughes' own poetry so wonderful.
And one gets the impression she has read her parents' work AND NO-ONE ELSE'S. I'm going to go as far as to say that her stuff would not have been published-at least, not 4 collections-were it not for the name.
People should at least have the audacity to read a book before criticising it. I was going to alert you about this book. I received it a few days ago and read it in one bout. Her best book since WAXWORKS. She is a poet in her won right and carried neither the style of Plath nor Hughes entirely. There are smatterings of both but that is only to be expected. Has anyone read the poem of Sara Coleridge for example? Nobody argued this about her. Is that because Coleridge was not Hughes!?
Rehan, I am indeed going to read the book and I hope to be pleasantly surprised.I didn't want to sound dismissive.
But I do think there certainly are more than smatterings of both in the poems of Frieda Hughes that I do know.
I also think that in one sense, Frieda Hughes never CAN be a poet in her own right. This is not her fault, it's simply the way things are. She is part of a mythology-again, not her fault-and it's a mythology that is impossible to shrug off when reading her poems. The problem is compounded by her writing ABOUT both Plath and Hughes. It makes the poetry more marketable-and let's remember, that's what publishers want, however good their literary judgement, etc-and it makes the poetry more marketable partly because, let's face it, people are nosy. We are a nosy species-I'm not exempting myself from that charge !
But I will read the book-fair point.
"In how many poems does she bitch about people picking over the bones of her mother?"
In how many poems and essays and novels and articles and books does your mother get picked over?
Would you not feel slightly inclined to bitch about that?
Is it not a slightly morbid thing to concentrate exclusively on Plath's death as if that one thing along gave her entire life's work (or indeed her life) meaning?
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