'When your life, and your parental heritage, are the subject of lifelong speculation and intrusion, it is harder to tell your story than it would be for most of us. When you are the daughter of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, your past and your parents get stolen from you on a regular basis and re-worked according to a dozen different dialectics: gossipy, ideological, literary, romanticised, quarrelsome...' 'This is not a plodding autobiography but the internal story, the utterly subjective way in which - if we are truthful - we all remember our own lives. The poems are a string of glittering or alarming moments, a necklace of life. They are, quite simply, the way it felt to her at each time...It is an original way to record your life, this partnership of short lyrics and large canvases; but then it has been an original life. We are privileged to share it' - Libby Purves. Breaking a lifetime's near-silence on her personal story, Frieda Hughes finally opens up in this sequence of 45 poems and pictures, one for each of the first 45 years of her life. Conceived as an integral part of a five-year personal exploration into abstract art, the poems form a complementary narrative on life, love, loss and family which shadows and illuminates the paintings. The resulting artwork is an abstract landscape of her life, 4 feet high and 225 feet long in 45 panels, the images included here with the poems in this book. "Forty-five" takes the reader on a journey through the difficult and inspirational events defining each year. We share her pain through her mother's suicide, her fight against bulimia, three marriages, and the loss of her father to cancer. But in the face of so much grief, she also shares her successes, loves and ultimate triumphs. This publication coincides with Frieda Hughes' Forty-five exhibition of her paintings (encircling a whole room) with the poems.
- ISBN10 0061550949
- ISBN13 9780061550942
- Publish Date 1 December 2007 (first published 28 November 2006)
- Publish Status Unknown
- Out of Print 11 April 2013
- Publish Country US
- Imprint HarperCollins eBooks
- Format eBook
- Pages 128
- Language English