'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. This publication coincides with Frieda Hughes' Forty-five exhibition of her paintings (encircling a whole room) with the poems.
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
The third effort from Hughes (Waxworks, 2003) is by far the least polished, and the most confessional: the daughter of poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath offers one poem for each of the years of her life. Readers of Plath and the elder Hughes may recognize Frieda's parents in the manner of the poems as in the matter. Ted Hughes's autobiographical Birthday Letters may provide fruitful comparisons, though Frieda Hughes looks more often at her own emotions than at others': "My mother, head in oven, died/ And me, already dead inside." Even as a child, Frieda reports, "I longed/ To fill the void in family/ Between father, aunt and brother-love." Subsequent poems follow her through "undiagnosed dyslexia" at school, borderline anorexia in her teens ("my fat removal/ A vain attempt to gain approval"), a glamorous but unsatisfying first husband, the dull frustration of jobs in sales and real estate, and the trials of chronic fatigue syndrome. Salvation comes through art school and, finally, through writing itself: "My poetry was where I hid/ When my father died." Readers in search of further information about Frieda Hughes's talented parents will find strong sentiments but no surprises; even those who admired this poet's earlier volumes may be taken aback by the artlessness on display. (Dec.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
“Striking observation. . . . A talent for image-making. . . . Raw and original.” (New York Times Book Review )
“Hughes writes about tragedy with [Sylvia] Plath-like wit.” (Entertainment Weekly )
“Hughes writes about tragedy with [Sylvia] Plath-like wit.” (Entertainment Weekly )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Frieda's best yet!,
This review is from: Forty-Five: Poems (Hardcover)
Since purchasing this book over a year ago, I have re-read it cover to cover at least three or four times. This is Frieda Hughes at her absolute best, writing about what she knows best: herself. Yet despite using herself as the subject for every poem in the collection, which some might argue to be a bit narcissistic, the poems have a universality that can speak to just about everyone. She tackles important issues, including depression, suicide, love and relationships, self-image issues, poverty, cancer, rebirth, success and family. I highly recommend this book, especially if you have not read anything by Frieda Hughes before.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
By the Numbers,
By Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER) (TOP 1000 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: Forty-Five: Poems (Hardcover)
No one ever accused Frieda Hughes of having all the talent in the family, but she is a beautiful and elegant woman with much to offer students of contemporary poetry.
It's hard to believe she was once a chubby blob with body-image issues, but in her teens, as we learn from FORTY-FIVE, she was uncomfortable with her weight and longed to be fashionably thin. She was shuttled back and forth across the Atlantic to visit her American relatives, who treated her well but fattened her up like a little puffin. By seventeen, she writes, "three things occupied my mind: men, poetry, and vomiting." And worse was yet to come. Lovers of Sylvia Plath's poetry will of course leap to the section where Frieda writes about her mother's death. Because she was only three, there isn't a whole lot here, but later in life, Ted Hughes stopped pretending to her that Sylvia had died of pneumonia and told her and little Nick the truth of the suicide. This revelation shattered Frieda's life and caused her to take up painting. (An exhibition of an enormous figurative landscape accompanies this book if you know where to look.) As a painter, she is a pretty goof poet; as a poet, she is occasionally stiff and awkward as a poor girl, or perhaps Milly Theale (in Henry James' novel THE WINGS OF THE DOVE) hesitant in the face of fortune hunters, but it would be hard to read through all of FORTY-FIVE in good faith and not give a little cheer when its heroine seems to come through some good and bad breaks with a modicum of grace, her "lack of progress/ Only transitory."
10 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
This is poetry???,
By Arletty (Williamstown, MA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Forty-Five: Poems (Hardcover)
I'm not sure many of these utterances are poems at all. There's a lot of whining, a lot of complaining about her stepmother screwing her out of money from her father's, Ted Hughes's, estate, and a lot of moaning about female troubles that is so far beneath her mother's explorations of feminine issues that she should be embarrassed. Maybe she should stick to painting.
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