In a student’s work I’d say telling not showing which is what most of these poems
In a student’s work I’d say “telling not showing”, which is what most of these poems, tragically, do. The lit, memorable image is thrown away by explanation, not left to speak for itself.Robert Lowell said Plath’s great poems, whose images Hughes riskily re- works, were “events, not records of events”. Greek tragedy uses myth to explore moral issues and inner motivation It is not all external responsibility Poetry needs something more than capital Fs. These poems, though their publication is an event, are not that. The end-stopped lines may suggest defeat by Fate, but they are flat, bathetic.Les Murray made a searing poem about his autistic son entirely out of end-stopped lines, but end-stopping served the poem; that’s how the boy talked. The inevitable tragic denouement, via the “other woman”, was appalling:We didn’t find her – she found us.She sniffed us out. The Fate she carriedSniffed us outAnd assembled us, inert ingredientsFor its experiment.
The Fable she carriedRequisitioned you and me and her,Puppets for its performance.This woman, with her mythic sparkle:Was helpless too.None of us could wake up.Nightmare looked out at the poppies.She sat there…Slightly filthy with erotic mystery.But Fate and Fable cannot do all the work. And I rippedThe door open and jumped in beside you…You stared, with iron in your face…I simplyTrod accompaniment, carried babies…Despite the mental illness, there’s enough archetypal confrontation here for all men to identify with that “I simply” stuff, and for all women to recognise that male bafflement which always seems a cop-out… Life gets “reassembled”:In the poem to be written so prettily,And to be worn like a fiesta maskBy the daemon that gazed through itAs through empty sockets – that still gazesThrough it at me.His explanation of what happened, though, is Fate Here’s where I draw back Not morally: aesthetically. The poems, like smoking entrailsCame soft into your hands.Her poetry is alien mask, secret weapon.
How had it started? WhatHad bared our edges? What quirky twistOf the moon’s blade had set us, so early in the day,Bleeding each other? What had I done? I hadSomehow misunderstood. Brilliant: the first book of poems on the subject.His bafflement is inextricable from responses to her poetry. One phrase she murmured was “The sole metaphor that ever escaped you/In easy speech, in my company.” Why did she keep her images private? “Who caught all/That teeming population, every one./To hang their tortured eyes and tongues up/In your poems?” For this is also the first book of poems based on bitter male awe at a woman’s poetic creativity:Those terrible, hypersensitiveFingers of your verse closed round it andFelt it alive. InaccessibleIn your dybbuk fury, babiesHurled into the car, you drove…What I rememberIs thinking: She’ll do something crazy. “Alone, either of us might have met with a life./Siamese-twinned, each of us festering/A unique soul-sepsis for the other, /Each of us was the stake/Impaling the other.” But mainly he focuses on a single scene: Plath yelling Chaucer at a load of cows, the ouija spirit which failed to foretell the price of fame; bears raiding their camp in Yellowstone Park.
You get her vitality; her piano-playing, her contempt for English beaches. As tragic narrative, as biography Siamese-twinned with autobiography, it is near-unbearable.At the “about” level, the message is male innocence (reflected in repeated rhythms of uncertainty) faced by female rage:It was May. “I saw/the flayed nerve, the unhealable facewound/which was all you had for courage.”
He says straight out they destroyed each other. The poems look back chronologically on their life in the light of her death It is the Berlin Wall coming down. You read with awe, from the foreshadowing of her illness in the first poem, where her “American grin” is put on “for the cameras, the judges, the strangers, the frighteners” That last word eases you into the tragedy. In Birthday Letters (Faber, pounds 14.99) Ted Hughes has produced a heartrending record of a man’s seven-year struggle with his wife’s mental illness and suicide, plus the 35-year aftermath; children (“Daddy, where’s Mummy?”), and the world’s unbearable vulturism
Historically, it is fascinating Everyone wanted to know what Hughes felt; now they can.
As well as live performances, the festival also boasts more than 100 films, plays and exhibitions
Venues around Leicester, from 6 to 15 February Ticket hotline and festival info: 0891 100 702. First out of the hat win.Hayward Gallery, Royal Festival Hall, South Bank, London SE1; Henri Cartier- Bresson: `Europeans’ runs from 5 Feb to 5 April.Hayward membership information line is 0171-450 2009. BILLED as Britain’s biggest stand-alone comedy event, the Leicester Comedy Festival gets underway from 6 February. Highlights include performances from David Baddiel, star of Fantasy Football League, poet John Hegley, plus Britain’s hottest political comedian, Jeremy Hardy. The award-winning Milton Jones (left) also appears, as do stars from London’s Comedy Store.