Stonepicker and The Book of Mirrors: Poems

Product Description

A new collection of unusually intimate poems by the highly acclaimed poet Frieda Hughes, Daughter of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

From Publishers Weekly

Hughes is the daughter of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (their son, Nicholas, committed suicide last month), and though several new poems complain that reviewers have not judged Frieda on her merits, many more—remembering the death of her father, taking up his Crow image, describing her own traumas in Plath’s signature rhythms—keep the poet’s parents clearly in mind: My buried mother, one complains, Is up-dug for repeat performances. Hughes (
Forty-Five) has talents for caricature and for allegory. Yet those talents are too often eclipsed by failures of technique, by poems that sound too much like diary entries: My head is full of graves/ Where I have buried my dead./ But in moments of weakness/ I hear them calling. Stonepicker, a persona, represents women who cannot accept blame; Stunckle, Stonepicker’s uncle, stands for men who want everything and give nothing (so the notes say). The two waltz together through The Book of Mirrors, the later and looser of the two sequences in this volume. Yet both characters recede before Frieda Hughes herself: a poet, but also a figure of intense biographical and journalistic interest, whose troubled times, chronicled here, should give life to these lines.
(May)
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About the Author

Born in London in 1960, Frieda Hughes is a painter and poet. She has also written children’s books, and was The Times (London) poetry columnist from 2006 to 2008. Frieda’s first collection of poetry, Wooroloo, was named after the hamlet in western Australia where she lived during the 1990s. Other collections followed: Stonepicker; Waxworks; Forty-five, a collection of autobiographical poems based on her life to the age of forty-five; The Book of Mirrors; and Alternative Values. In this last book, Frieda used the subject of her poems to inform the accompanying abstract images—painted in oils on canvas—combining the two driving forces in her life. Her poems have also appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The London Magazine, The Times (London), and The Spectator (London). Frieda resides in Wales with owls and motorbikes.