Oct 07, 2010debwalker rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
Hughes died in 1998, the same year Birthday Letters was published. The collection addressed his marriage to Plath, but did not specifically comment on her death.
Plath, a poet and novelist best known for The Bell Jar, killed herself in February 1963, shortly after separating from Hughes.
In October 2010, a new poem "Last Letter" has surfaced:
“What happened that night, your final night?”
................
“And I had started to write when the telephone
Jerked awake, in jabbering alarm,
Remembering everything. It recovered in my hand.
Then a voice like a selected weapon
Or a measured injection,
Coolly delivered its four words
Deep into my ear: ‘Your wife is dead.’”
It’s believed that the poem was written in the early ’70s.
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Birthday Letters