Though full of lived particulars the events described seem to be happening on a frieze with Hughes as he puts it himself

Though full of lived particulars, the events described seem to be happening on a frieze, with Hughes (as he puts it himself) like “a fly outside on the window-pane / Of my own domestic drama”. The tone is warm, feverish even, but not intimate or confessional; there is passion but no pretence at present-tense immediacy Hughes uses hindsight, as well as insight He doesn’t just see, or feel. What gives the poems their extraordinary power is that Hughes is an active protagonist inside the myth – like Jonah in the whale, or the Minotaur in the labyrinth. Yet he must also stand outside, looking back in love and agony down history’s long lens, his actions frozen, as if “permanently / bending so briefly at your open coffin”. As the story unfolds, it isn’t facts Hughes offers but myth – myth such as Ovid, Dante or William Blake wrote, thick with classical references but also steeped in folklore and fairytale. Your curtains.”But these enumerations and anecdotes are deceptive, skin-deep. And your daughter’s / Fingers remember your fingers / In everything they do.” He even lists her bric-a-brac: “Your mantelpiece mermaid of terracotta / Your coppery fondue pan Your linen.

“Remember how we picked daffodils? / Nobody else remembers, but I remember.” “Who will remember your fingers?.. / I remember your fingers. They go on holiday – to Spain (which frightens her), to Paris (where she’s agitated and he “like a guide dog”), to Yellowstone Park, where a bear breaks into their car at night to steal the goodies from the freezer box. They muck about on a Ouija board, and the prankster-spirit they summon up gives them useful tips for that week’s pools coupon They sell daffodils they’ve grown at 7d a dozen. Sylvia takes up beekeeping, and Ted gets stung, “flung like a headshot jackrabbit” as the bees plant “their volts, their thudding electrodes” in his head.Throughout, memories swarm back, sometimes as snapshots, sometimes as whole episodes, meticulously recalled. The manner is discursive but also, for that reason, authenticating. What she wore, the things they did together, her “actual words as they floated / Out of [her] throat and tongue”: such details remind us that Hughes was there and the biographers weren’t. Now he wants to reclaim the story, for her and for himself and for their children.The book begins circumstantially, even prosily, by Hughes’s standards.

Hughes’s bitterest charge against biographers and critics is that they’ve turned this story into a Fantasia, as remote as Ancient Egypt, ignoring the feelings of people who are still around. My story”, he says, addressing her in her grave, but many others have told the story already and it comes as a shock at first to find Hughes broaching material that has been gone over so often before: the first kiss (which left him a “ring-moat of toothmarks / That was to brand my face for the next month”), then courtship, marriage, travels in Europe and the US, high ambition and pitiful earnings in London, the move to a dream home in Devon, the crumbling of the marriage, London again and the last throw of the dice during the cruel winter of 1962-3. To have issued poems about Plath during the various controversies of the last three decades would have looked like a press release, a “statement”, a placation. He needed to do things in his own time, and on his own terms, which meant waiting – till the public was ready to listen and, more important, till the poems were ready to be heard.
There are no dates to the 88 poems in Birthday Letters It may be that some lines here go back 20 or 30 years. But to judge by the unifying intensity of the sequence, the headlong integrity, most of the writing has been done recently, in the same prodigious burst that has brought us Hughes’s critical writings on Shakespeare and Coleridge, a children’s book (The Iron Woman), two anthologies, and the wonderful Tales from Ovid.The why and when of it don’t greatly matter, since the Birthday Letters, as Hughes well knows, won’t be read like any of his other books His marriage to Plath has long been the stuff of legend “It is only a story / Your story. Within his own walls, within his own head, he was hard at work, communing, memorialising, analysing, exorcising, trying to understand.