The Birth of a Poet

By Paul Gray

Most beginning poets don't have to face ravenous public curiosity about their private lives and past histories. Frieda Hughes should be so fortunate. The dust-jacket blurb on her first book of poems, Wooroloo (HarperFlamingo; $20), alludes delicately to the author's "unusual literary pedigree," which only fires curiosity while pretending to discourage it. For Frieda Hughes is the daughter of Ted Hughes, Britain's current poet laureate, and Sylvia Plath, whose stunning confessional poems written just before her 1963 suicide made her posthumously famous and, to many, a martyr-saint in the bargain. The Hughes-Plath story has fueled numerous books and endless, usually acrimonious, debates. Frieda Hughes, 38, grew up as a bit player in an engrossing literary drama.

Not that she realized her role at the time. She was just shy of her third birthday when her mother died and, as she tells TIME in an exclusive U.S. interview, retains only fragmented, "private" memories of their life together. She adds that her father--and this may surprise all the Hughes haters among the Plath defenders--raised her and her younger brother Nicholas with a keen sense of their mother's continuing presence in their young lives. "I grew up thinking of her very much as an angel. Not even so much in death, but also in life. And of course, as I grew older, it began to dawn on me that that was impossible, because she was a human being first." Hughes didn't know that her parents were famous until she was assigned their books in school. She has read "some," she now confesses, but not all. And the books about her parents? "None. Reading them wouldn't help me in any way."

She began writing poems in her childhood but decided, once she understood her parents' renown, to keep them private "for the obvious reason that comparisons would be made." Instead, after a period of adolescent turmoil--anorexia, an impulsive and brief marriage to a biker at age 19--Hughes became a painter and an author of children's books. Eventually, she settled in Wooroloo, "a small hamlet, very small," in Australia, to paint landscapes of the stark, almost surreal terrain. And, as it happened, to write poetry that other people might read.

Wooroloo would be an impressive debut coming from any new poet, but the book will be read by many out of plain curiosity: In what manner does a child of those parents write? And although Hughes denies being consciously influenced by the work of her mother and father, traces from both are easy to see. Her mother's violent, lacerating imagery appears in a poem called "Hysterectomy": "My disease will be stripped out/ Like the rotten lining of a leather coat." Plath's angry confessional tone is echoed in "Granny": "You loved me not, just saw/ A copy of the face/ You gave birth to." In "Readers," Hughes rails at those who have made a cult out of her mother: "They turned her over like meat on coals/ To find the secrets of her withered thighs/ And shrunken breasts."

Such poems emit a screechiness that Plath's, at their most powerful, avoided. Hughes is more successful when she turns her attention, as her father has done so brilliantly, to the natural world. Here is a fox: "Half grown/ His small feet black as matchheads." Here is a bush fire that consumed much of her property in Wooroloo: "It began with a small red spot/ That flowered in the floorboards,/ Its anemone danced, and the music/ Was the crack of wood applauding." Such moments suggest that poets can be born as well as made.

Now happily married to a fellow painter, the Hungarian-born Laszlo Lukacs, Hughes has moved from her property in Wooroloo--the bush fires grew too harrowing--and lives full-time in London. She is pleased to have conquered her own reluctance to appear in print as a poet, despite all the comparisons that await her work. And she wants to concentrate on the future, not her parents' storied past. "I can't ever know the truth," she says of her mother's suicide. "Why would I wish to dwell on it, when there is so much else in life?"

--Reported by Andrea Sachs/New York

With reporting by Andrea Sachs/New York