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
Chinese Whispers (poetry collection) Chinese Whispers (poetry collection) Chinese Whispers is a 2002 poetry collection by the American writer John Ashbery. It was Ashbery's 20th collection and consists of 65 individual poems. Jeremy Noel Tod of "The Guardian" called Ashbery "a great nonsense poet", and held forward similarities between his poetry and that of Samuel Foote, Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. Tod grouped "Chinese Whispers" with Ashbery's last few collections, which he considered to also be concerned with time and old age, and wrote: "Although always oblique about the author's own life, these thick recent collections do feel like diaries. They are various, and