Forty-Five: Poems by Frieda Hughes

Anything Frieda Hughes writes is of interest. As the child of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, she immediately drops us into the fateful family life of two of the 20th century’s most influential poets.

Alluded to in her previous collections, Wooroloo (1998) and Waxworks (2003), this life dominates the foreground of her new collection, Forty-Five — 45 poems, one for each year of her life. The poems complement a series of 45 abstract paintings that, when hung together, measure 4 by 250 feet. Ariel (1965), the volume completed in Plath’s final year, and Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters (1998), published before he died, certainly loom in the background here.

The list of Frieda Hughes’ problems echoes those of her mother’s tragic life: depression, anorexia, chronic fatigue, a hysterectomy, a motorbike accident, spousal abuse, two homes lost to arson, failed relationships — these poems record it all.

Hidden from the spotlight by her father after her mother’s death (when she was almost 3), Frieda is 15 when she learns that Plath had committed suicide. These poems describe a relentless quest for a mother-substitute, not fulfilled by Assia Wevill, Hughes’ second wife, for whom he left Plath, and who committed suicide herself six years after Plath (taking her own daughter with her).

Hughes’ third wife, Carol, appears here as the evil stepmother, right down to denying his children the proceeds from his books, as promised in his will.

These poems certainly illustrate Frieda Hughes’ words in the introduction: “There were happy times. But happiness was not what chiselled a shape out of me, and often it flowered in a garden of broken glass from more painful experiences.”

The final poems in Forty-Five suggest that Frieda Hughes has found love and peace in her marriage to the painter Laszlo Lukacs, and in her painting and writing. The tribulations and failed love affairs of her earlier years, however, which are the subject of most of this collection, demonstrate that hers was indeed a difficult life; in “Twenty-Fifth Year 1984” she tells us of one marriage: “For three months I slept / Foetal on the spare-room floor.”

Jobs as waitress, tax collector, greeting-card saleswoman, farmer fill the time as she goes: “Swimming in a bowl, / the side of which I could not negotiate.”

I found these poems fascinating, but more as memoir than as poems. Narrative-driven, they are loosely organized by title/year, and too prosy. Attempts at rhyme are often awkward, and the final poems suggest the need for distance from the events she describes, if only to allow craft to transform the anger into something more creative — in ways that Plath did so brilliantly in Ariel and Frieda Hughes herself did successfully in Waxworks.

The greatest weakness of the book is the separation of the poems from the works of art to which they relate. The reader can view these on a Web site but failure to reproduce even some of these with the poems seems hard to justify.

Frieda Hughes is an award-winning visual artist as well as a poet, and a project such as she has undertaken here needs to be judged also on the integration of visual and verbal. Viewing the paintings suggests that she has succeeded in this, the poems enhancing the meaning of the abstract paintings by providing some details of this painter/poet’s life.

For Hughes’ own take on these details, however, Forty-Five does give us some winners, such her father’s donation of an iron to her poverty-driven homestead. Ted Hughes’ iron — that’s an image to remember. But so is the image from Frieda’s “Sixth Year 1965”: “My Father, bag of sorrow.” Biographers of Plath and Hughes, who have provided diverse and often opposing versions of this story, should take heed: As these poems show, the family portrait is far from finished.