Birthday Letters Birthday Letters Birthday Letters, published in 1998, is a collection of poetry by English poet and children's writer Ted Hughes. Released only months before Hughes's death, the collection won multiple prestigious literary awards. This collection of eighty-eight poems is widely considered to be Hughes's most explicit response to the suicide of his estranged wife Sylvia Plath in 1963, and to their widely discussed, politicized and "explosive" marriage. Until the publication of this book, 35 years after Plath's suicide, Hughes had said and published nearly nothing about his relationship and life with Plath. When it was discovered that he had infidelities
Fiona Benson (poet) motherhood, are paired seamlessly with moments of great tenderness" Fiona Benson (poet) Fiona Benson (born 1978) is an English poet. She has one full poetry collection, "Bright Travellers", which has won numerous awards including being on the shortlist for the prestigious T.S. Eliot Prize in 2015. She has an upcoming poetry collection, "Vertigo and Ghost", due out in 2019. Benson was born in Wroughton, England. She received her Master of Letters and PhD in English from Saint Andrew’s University, Scotland, where she wrote her dissertation on the Ophelia figure in Early Modern Drama. She is resident in Thorverton, Devon. Benson