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
Ruth Miller (poet) Ruth Miller (poet) Ruth Miller (1919–1969) was a South African poet. Born in 1919 in Uitenhage, South Africa, she grew up in the northern Transvaal and spent her adult life in Johannesburg. She worked as a school secretary and later English teacher. She died of cancer in 1969. She wrote short stories and plays, but is best known for her poems, which were frequently anthologised. She won the Ingrid Jonker Prize for her first volume of poems, "Floating Islands" (1965). A second collection "Selected Poems" appeared in 1968 in the Phoenix Living Poets series. After her death a selection of