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 poetry collection.

Breaking forty-five years of near-silence on the subject of her life, Frieda Hughes finally 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, losing her father to cancer, and an apparently insurmountable breakdown in the relationship with her stepmother. In the face of so much grief, she also shared 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, and never more so than now, as she takes on the topics of life, love, loss, and family. For any love of poetry or for anyone who wants to know what happened in the life of Frieda Hughes after she so tragically lost her mother, this book is the answer.