Forty-five
Book
Paperback/Softback
112 pages
978-1-85224-763-8 (ISBN)
Description
'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.
Publication was to have coincided with the opening of Frieda Hughes' Forty-five exhibition of her paintings (encircling a whole room) in London, but she had to withdraw the book from publication for legal reasons, even though the poems had already been published in the US by HarperCollins in an edition not including the paintings.
'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.
Publication was to have coincided with the opening of Frieda Hughes' Forty-five exhibition of her paintings (encircling a whole room) in London, but she had to withdraw the book from publication for legal reasons, even though the poems had already been published in the US by HarperCollins in an edition not including the paintings.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Tyne and Wear
United Kingdom
Illustrations
Illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 225 mm
Width: 230 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-85224-763-8 (9781852247638)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Frieda Hughes was born in London in 1960, grew up in Devon, and after living in various parts of England and Australia now lives on the Welsh Borders. She wrote and painted from an early age, and for many years has been a painter and children's writer. She received a NESTA Award in 2002 to help her work on Forty-five, her portrait of her life in 45 poems and paintings, the poems from which were published by HarperCollins in the US in 2006. Her most recent work is included is Alternative Values: poems & paintings, launched by Bloodaxe in 2015 at an exhibition of the paintings at London's Belgravia Gallery. Out of the Ashes (2018) draws on her four previous poetry collections from Bloodaxe: Wooroloo (1999), Stonepicker (2001), Waxworks (2002) and The Book of Mirrors (2009).
Her first children's book, Getting Rid of Edna, was published by Heinemann (UK) and Harper & Row (USA) in 1984. Four other titles followed from Simon and Schuster: The Meal a Mile Long (1989) and Waldorf and the Sleeping Granny (1990), which she also illustrated; followed by The Thing in the Sink (1992) and Rent-a-Friend (1994). Her most recent titles are The Tall Story (MacDonald Young Books, 1997) and Three Scary Stories (HarperCollins, 2001).
Her first children's book, Getting Rid of Edna, was published by Heinemann (UK) and Harper & Row (USA) in 1984. Four other titles followed from Simon and Schuster: The Meal a Mile Long (1989) and Waldorf and the Sleeping Granny (1990), which she also illustrated; followed by The Thing in the Sink (1992) and Rent-a-Friend (1994). Her most recent titles are The Tall Story (MacDonald Young Books, 1997) and Three Scary Stories (HarperCollins, 2001).