Forty-five Poems

The daughter of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes looks back on forty-five years of loves, losses, pain, hope and joy in this revealing and poignant poetry collection—first time in paperback.

“Hughes writes about tragedy with [Sylvia] Plath-like wit.”—Entertainment Weekly

Breaking forty-five years of near-silence on the subject of her life, Frieda Hughes opens up through the medium she knows best—poetry. In this extraordinary collection of personal poems, she takes the reader step-by-step through the difficult and inspirational events that defined each year of her life, and which she encapsulates here. We share her pain through her mother’s suicide, her fight against bulimia, three marriages, the devastating loss of her father to cancer, and an insurmountable breakdown in the relationship with her stepmother.

But along with the tribulations, she also shares the happy moments in her life, including her successes, her love, and her ultimate triumphs as an accomplished poet and painter. As she grows older, her narrative unfolds to show a complex life beautifully rendered in her poetry.  

Hughes is a master of powerful, moving, and vivid language, as seen with the critical success of her past collections, Wooroloo and Waxworks. For any lover of poetry or for anyone who wants to know what happened to Frieda Hughes after she so tragically lost her mother, this book is the answer.