Forty-Five: Poems

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."

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.