Wooroloo - Hardcover

Hughes, Frieda

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060192712 ISBN 13: 9780060192716

Publisher: Harper, 1998

Synopsis

"Wild oats pale as peroxide lie down amongThe bottle brushes. A beaten army, bleaching.Life bled into the earth already, and seeds awaiting, Stiff little spiked children wanting water. . . ."

Welcome to the meticulously observed world of Frieda Hughes. It is a world of tangible materiality constantly on the brink of change, a world populated with foxes and fire, fathers and lovers, mothers and birdmen--a world that is ultimately combustible, fragile, fearsome, and elegiacally beautiful. Hughes maps the landscape, both within and without, in language possessed of an almost painterly sensitivity and a sublime mastery of craft. The self she depicts is one who is tested by loss, danger, betrayal, and abandonment, yet one who is transformed through experience into a world beyond nihilism and despair: a place that makes possible truth, strength of character, and the redemptive powers of love.

Though a writer of unusual literary pedigree, Frieda Hughes is first and foremost an original voice, and Wooroloo foretells what is certain to be an important body of work from this exquisite literary artist.

About this title

About the Author

Born in London in 1960, Frieda Hughes is a painter and poet. She has also written children’s books, and was The Times (London) poetry columnist from 2006 to 2008. Frieda’s first collection of poetry, Wooroloo, was named after the hamlet in western Australia where she lived during the 1990s. Other collections followed: Stonepicker; Waxworks; Forty-five, a collection of autobiographical poems based on her life to the age of forty-five; The Book of Mirrors; and Alternative Values. In this last book, Frieda used the subject of her poems to inform the accompanying abstract images—painted in oils on canvas—combining the two driving forces in her life. Her poems have also appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The London Magazine, The Times (London), and The Spectator (London). Frieda resides in Wales with owls and motorbikes. 

Reviews

Like her father, Britain's poet laureate Ted Hughes, Hughes fille has written several children's books, but here she makes her poetic debut with this very Hughesianly titled collection (think of Ted's Wodwo). As with Birthday Letters, we are nearly forced into equating the poet with the author of some of these poems, such as "The Farmer," which recounts a gentle "tree-watching" man's early marriage: "Now her words/ Beat him down, he was harvested in his own fields./ His bruises bloomed, those blue roses sank their stain/ Beneath his surface, made him dumb with pain.// He learned to be silent.... At last, she left him." One will not fail to recognize Frieda Hughes's mother, the late Sylvia Plath, in these lines, just as Plath's own mother is chastened in "Granny": "You loved me not, just saw/ A copy of the face/ You gave birth to." The book also makes use of Hughes pere's characteristic imagery: "The fox chewed his thoughtful paw, gnawed/ At his own toes and knew his differences." Elsewhere, a stark visceralism ("Dead Cow"; "Caesarian"; "Hysterectomy") rehearses some of Plath's more vituperative tropes, particularly in "Readers," concerning critics' attempts to reanimate Plath in their own works. Such adaptations would not be a problem in a stronger book. But while these and the closely descriptive, allegorical animal poems ("Fish"; "Walrus"; "Giraffes"?even "Wife" seems part of the menagerie) have a defiant way with an image, most prove hard to read outside of the Birthday Letters flap.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The daughter of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, and a painter and childrens book author in her own right, adds her own voice to the recent hubbub about her parents in two poems that will surely draw the most attention in the first volume of highly accomplished verse. Granny angrily addresses her maternal grandmother with its brilliant, fractured fairy-tale opening (Mirror, mirror on the wall/Who is the least dead/Of us all?) and finds the poet glad to avoid her mothers curse of mother-guilt from the loveless old woman. Readers rails against the cultists who pore over her mothers work and life, desecrating her memory, fingering her mental underwear, leaving nothing private for her daughter. These fierce poems aside, Hughes shares her fathers rough elementalismbones and mud and rocks share space with a bestiary of violent and dead birds, insects, and mammals: a dead cow bloated by the side of the road, a rotting kookaburra, a spider killing with a kiss, and a fox eating through its trapped leg. Theres nothing sentimental in her poems about the tiger, the walrus, and the giraffe, though her deceptively plain languagewith its childrens-book vocabularylures you into her chilling and unsparing world. Like her father, she compounds words, alliterates, and rhymes with a blunt direction, and an almost gothic sensibility. For all her brute honesty and Grimm thoughts, Hughes finds consolation in the insane grin/And rolling belly of Nothing, which is, in her dark vision, enough. A major debut. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harper
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060192712
• ISBN 13: 9780060192716
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 80