An extraordinary book . . . [Hughes's] subject is Plath herself--how she looked and moved and talked, her pleasures, rages, uncanny dreams, and many terrors, what was good between them and where it went wrong. "A. Alvarez, The New Yorker" The critics who are urging us to regard these poems as masterpieces are right. Their intensity of feeling, the clarity of their imagery, the precision, energy, simplicity, and fluidity of their language are still striking. "Paul Levy, The Wall Street Journal" An emotional, direct, regretful, and entranced [tone] pervades the book's strongest poems, which are quiet and thoughtful and conversational. "Katha Pollitt, The New York Times Book Review" Most of the poems in "Birthday Letters" have a wonderful immediacy and tenderness that's new to Hughes's writing, a tenderness that enables him to communicate Plath's terrors as palpably as her own verse, and to convey his own lasting sense of loss and grief. . . . They should be read because they constitute the strongest, most emotionally tactile work of Hughes' career. "Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times" The publication of "Birthday Letters" is the most sensational event I can think of in the recent history of English-language poetry. "Christopher Benfey, Slate" The book comes like a thunderbolt from the blue. And reading it is like being hit by a thunderbolt. Its power is sometimes tender, sometimes funny, sometimes anguished, and always springing from a burning, continuous present. Anyone who thought Hughes's reticence was proof of his hard heart will immediately see how stony they have been themselves. This is a book written by someone obsessed, stricken, and deeply loving. There is nothing like it in literature. "Andrew Motion, The London Times""

Ted Hughes died in October 1998, having received acclaim in the last year of his life: the Whitbread Book of the Year Prize for "Tales from Ovid," the Forward Prize for" Birthday Letters," and the British Order of Merit. He was Poet Laureate to Queen Elizabeth II.