With just two exceptions, these 88 poems, in the form of an intimate and candid narrative, are addressed to Sylvia Plath, the American poet to whom Ted Hughes was married. They were written over a period of more than 25 years, the first a few years after her suicide in 1963.

Ted Hughes's Birthday letters , published in 1998, was greeted with astonishment and acclaim. In Ariel's gift , Erica Wagner provides a commentary to the poems, pointing the reader towards the events that shaped them, and, crucially, showing how they draw upon Plath's own work.

A brilliant, elegantly reasoned meditation on the nature of biography. Examines the biographies of Sylvia Plath.

Crow was Ted Hughes's fourth book of poems for adults and a pivotal moment in his writing career. In it, he found both a structure and a persona that gave his vision a new power and coherence. A. Alvarez wrote in the Observer, 'Each fresh encounter with despair becomes the occasion for a separate, almost funny, story in which natural forces and creatures, mythic figures, even parts of the body, ..

At the outset of his career Ted Hughes described letter writing as 'excellent training for conversation with the world', and he was to become a prolific master of this art which combines writing and talking. This selection documents the course of a life at once resolutely private but intensely attuned to other lives.

A biography of Hughes's mistress, Assia Wevill, this book views the Sylvia Plath-Ted Hughes relationship and marriage, and presents the journey that shaped her life. This is a story formed by the pull of fatal attraction and obsessive love, fidelity and adultery, cruelty and tenderness, dependence and rebellion, envy, and self-sacrifice.

This is a transcription of the journals kept by Sylvia Plath over the last 12 years of her life. It gives insight into her final years and the evolution of her last poems.

Not a conventional biograpy, this book offers an explanation of Sylvia Plath's death in 1963. The author looks back on Plath's life in an attempt to offer an objective account of why she killed herself and discusses her life with her husband Ted Hughes.

The Collected Poems spans fifty years of work, from Hawk in the Rain to the bestselling Birthday Letters. It also includes the complete texts of such seminal publications as Crow and Tales from Ovid as well as those children's poems that Hughes felt crossed over into adult poetry. Most significantly it also includes small press publications and editions that, until now, remain uncollected and ...

Hughes's three contributions to the anthology After Ovid an accurate account of the original so thoroughly imbued with his own qualities that it was as if Latin and English poet were somehow the same person. This volume continues the project, with 24 passages including the stories of Phaeton, Actaon, Echo and Narcissus, Procne and Midas.

A collection of prose pieces by the Poet Laureate, on literary matters and on writers as diverse as Emily Dickinson, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Walter de la Mare, T.S. Eliot, Wilfred Owen and Sylvia Plath. Hughes also expresses concerns about education, the environment, and the arts in general.

The author argues that without a concept of fantasy we can understand neither Plath's work nor what she has come to represent. She proposes that no writer demonstrates more forcefully than Plath the importance of inner psychic life for the wider sexual and political world.

This volume contains all of Sylvia Plath's mature poetry written from 1956 up to her death in 1963. It was awarded the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The text is preceded by an introduction by Ted Hughes and followed by notes and comments on individual poems. An appendix contains 50 earlier poems.

When Remains of Elmet , Cave Birds and River were first published, the weight of each collection tended to be overlooked in favour of other considerations. This book shows the coherence and poetic strength of each sequence and its relationship to the larger output.

A selection of work by the former Poet Laureate ranging from The Hawk in the Rain to Rain-Charm for the Duchy , as well as uncollected poems from each decade of his working life. Hughes also included a group of new poems, some of which appeared later in Birthday Letters .

In the Oresteia - the only trilogy in Greek drama which survives from antiquity - Aeschylus took as his subject the bloody chain of murder and revenge within the royal family of Argos. Moving from darkness to light, from rage to self-governance, from primitive ritual to civilized institution, its spirit of struggle and regeneration is eternal.

Sylvia Plath's correspondence, addressed chiefly to her mother, from her time at Smith College in the early 1950s up to her suicide in London in February 1963. In addition to her capacity for domestic and writerly happiness, these letters also hint at her potential for deep despair.

A collection of children's poems by the late Poet Laureate. All of them are about the sea and some of the characters who live in and around it: a bashful mussel, a boastful limpet, a thieving sandflea, an orphaned seal.

Fay Godwin is commonly regarded as this country's finest landscape photographer. Ted Hughes, who was born and brought up in the part of the world she has captured in these atmospheric studies, was inspired by them to provide a verse text, one of the most personal things he has written.