Frieda Hughes
PERSONAL: Born April 1, 1960 in London, England. Married the Hungarian artist Laszlo Lukacs in 1996.
EDUCATION: Studied at St Martin’s School of Art, London, England, from 1985. Graduated in 1988 with a BA (Hons).
CAREER: Poet, author, artist. Also worked as a waitress, as a clerk for the Collector of Taxes and the Ministry of Defence, as sales manager of a greeting card publishing company and for an estate agency.
LITERARY AGENT: Ros Edwards and Helenka Fuglewicz,
Edwards Fuglewicz, 49 Great Ormond Street, London WC1N 3HZ
Tel: 020-7405-6725. Fax: 020-7405-6726.
CHILDREN’S BOOKS:
1986: Getting Rid of Edna (6 short stories for children) published in the U.K. by Heinemann. Getting Rid of Aunt Edna published by Harper and Row in the U.S. Illustrated by Ed Levine. Published in paperback in 1988 in the U.K. by Pan Books Ltd (Young Piper edition.) Re-illustrated by Scoular Anderson.
1989: The Meal A Mile Long (Picture book for very young children - author illustrated) published by Simon and Schuster in the U.S., Australia and the U.K.
1990: Waldorf And The Sleeping Granny (A novel for 10-12 year olds - author illustrated) published by Simon and Schuster in the U.K.
1992: The Thing In The Sink (7-9 year olds) published by Simon and Schuster in the U.K. Illustrated by Chris Riddell. 2003: Re-issued by Hodder Children’s Books.
1994: Rent-a-friend (7-9 year olds) published by Simon and Schuster in the U.K. Illustrated by Chris Riddell. 2003: Re-issued by Hodder Children’s Books.
1997: The Tall Story (7-9 year olds) published by Macdonald Young Books in the U.K. Illustrated by Chris Riddell. 2003: Re-issued by Hodder Children’s Books.
2001: Three Scary Stories (Three stories for older children illustrated by Chris Riddell) published by Harper Collins UK.
ADULT FICTION:
1986: Keeper of the Keys (short story) published in the Canadian quarterly Exile.
POETRY COLLECTIONS:
1998: Wooroloo published in the U.S. by Harper Flamingo. In 1999 by Fremantle Arts Centre Press in Australia and by Bloodaxe in the U.K. Author illustrated covers. Wooroloo received a Poetry Book Society special commendation.
2001: Stonepicker published by Bloodaxe in the U.K. and Fremantle Press in Australia. Author illustrated cover. Harper Flamingo in the U.S. in 2005.
2002: Waxworks published by Bloodaxe in the U.K. Harper Collins in the U.S and Fremantle Press in Australia in February 2003.
Frieda Hughes’s poems have also been published in The New Yorker, Tatler, The Spectator, Thumbscrew, The Paris Review, First Pressings, and The London Magazine among others.
PAINTING:
1989: Group exhibition at the Chris Beetles Gallery, St James’s, London.
1991: Group exhibition with the Milne and Moller Gallery at Art Expo 1991, London.
1992: Group exhibition with the Milne and Moller Gallery at Art Expo 1992, London.
1993: Solo exhibition at the Anna Mei Chadwick Gallery, Fulham, London.
1993: Joint exhibition at the Delaney Gallery, Perth, Western Australia.
1993: Group exhibition at Perth Galleries, Perth, Western Australia.
1994: Group exhibition at the Gomboc Gallery, Middle Swan, Western Australia.
1994: Group exhibition at Gallery Savah, Sydney, Australia.
1995: Solo exhibition at the Provenance Gallery, Sydney, Australia.
1995: Solo exhibition at the Anna Mei Chadwick Gallery, Fulham, London.
1996: Joint exhibition with Laszlo Lukacs, in London, sponsored by Lloyds Bank plc.
1997: Joint exhibition with Laszlo Lukacs at The Cork St Gallery, London.
1998: Joint exhibition with Laszlo Lukacs, sponsored by The Royal Commonwealth Society, London.
1999: Joint studio exhibition with Laszlo Lukacs, London.
2001: Joint studio exhibition with Laszlo Lukacs, London.
2002: Joint studio exhibition with Laszlo Lukacs, London.
2003: Joint exhibition with Laszlo Lukacs at the Soan Gallery, London.
Notes: Frieda Hughes’s first poetry collection Wooroloo was named after the tiny country hamlet where she lived in Western Australia between 1994 and 1998. This is where she wrote most of the Wooroloo poems. Frieda was drawn to Western Australia’s diverse landscape and open wilderness on a visit in 1988 and moved there in 1991. It proved to be a rich source of inspiration both for her poetry and her paintings until she returned to England in 1998. She and her husband, Laszlo Lukacs, lived in London until 2004 when the need for larger studio space persuaded them to move to Mid Wales.
LATEST PROJECT:
In June 2002 Frieda Hughes was given an Invention and Innovation award by NESTA (National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) for her project FORTY YEARS. This project was to produce forty abstract paintings which would be based on forty poems, one representing each of the first forty years of her life. The idea was to explore the emotional impact of each year on the canvas while the poems would be the ‘key’ to the abstraction. As the project progressed, Frieda added five more paintings and poems to bring the project up to her forty-fifth year.
As of 2006 the poems are finished and the paintings are completed. The result is a four foot high, two hundred and twenty-five foot long painting in forty-five panels, which is an abstract landscape of the first forty-five years of her life.
Harper Collins (US) will publish the poems of ‘Forty-Five’ in December 2006. Bloodaxe Books (UK) will publish both the poems and the paintings in April 2007.
***
Frieda Hughes’ Medusa
Copyright © by Dan Schneider, 8/23/03
Ted Hughes & Sylvia Plath spawned. The result of that act (at least 1 of those acts) was the foisting of Frieda Hughes into being. Born of a poetaster & a great poet, which side’s talents & traits would she garner? You guessed it- ‘Daddy, daddy, you….’ Actually FH went in to the painting field to express herself. After no real success there she decided to cash in on her brand name & ‘publish’ poetry. I parenthesize ‘publish’ because it’s always amusing how people with connections make it seem so easy- that they decide to ‘publish’- & not struggle to be published, like the woe-begotten unconnected masses.
Here are some unintentionally humorous snippets from FH’s assorted online bios:
‘Frieda Hughes has exhibited her paintings in several solo and group exhibitions in Britain, the United States, and Australia. She is the author of seven books for children. Ms. Hughes’s poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and London magazine, among others. Her debut collection, Wooroloo, was published to wide acclaim. She is married to the painter Lászlo Lukács and lives in London.’
‘Frieda Hughes is the daughter of Sylvia Plath and former Poet Laureate Ted Hughes. She says: “As a teenager, I thought I was attempting to define my own identity and this meant I wanted to be as different from my parents as humanly possible. I decided I was going to be defined by something else. I was going to paint. “I hated even reading poetry because I felt as if it dragged me back into the world in which my parents excelled. Even though my mother was dead, her poetry lived on. But I was nonetheless compelled to write poetry. “The fact that I needed to write poetry while wanting at the same time to avoid it because my parents were both poets made my personal tug-of-war very painful.”’
‘As Frieda approached her 40th birthday, in 2000, she found herself seeking a new way to develop her work further. She says: “There’s is something about turning 40, looking back at all those years behind you and taking stock of what you have done with them. “I had been looking for a subject on which to base a cohesive series of paintings and hit upon the idea of a painting for each one of my 40 years – and a poem to accompany it. Since the paintings would be abstract, the words would be the key. “I didn’t have the money to support such a project. Without funding, I would have had to stagger the work over 10 or 12 years. It would have missed the point, they would not have hung together as a sequence. A friend mentioned NESTA, so I applied. Without their support, this project would have ended up on a shelf somewhere.”’
Would that we would be so lucky. But, the universe is cold & indifferent to our sensitivities. Thus FH has had several books of poems published. All bad, with occasional crests into mediocrity. Of course, don’t tell that to the professional blurbists:
Like Wooroloo, Frieda Hughes’s debut collection, the poems of Waxworks will haunt a reader’s imagination.
Causing nightmares is not a positive thing, though. But like her mom, FH is rapt by the idea that poetry is all about feelings & the more blatant aspects of ‘Confessionalism’: ‘The challenge has been to face aspects of the past to which I thought I would never have to return. The emotion strikes you as though it is still current and that comes as a surprise. You think you are immune to it, because it’s in the past. But more often, you’re not.’ Wow, another detailed self-analysis of one’s art.
On to the poem:
Medusa
She is the gypsy
Whose young have rooted
In the very flesh of her scalp.
Her eyes are drill-holes where
Your senses spin, and you are stone
Even as you stand before her.
She opens her lips to speak,
And have you believe.
She has more tongues to deceive
Than you can deafen your ears to.
If you could look away, the voices
From the heads of her vipers
Would be heard to argue.
If you could look away,
The pedestals of your feet might move.
If you could look away,
The song from the cathedral of her mouth
Would fall to the floor like a lie.
The humorous thing about this poem, online, was that several sites had a link explaining that the Medusa was a Gorgon, the snakehead, etc. Talk about condescension! OK, lemme state that there are a few egregious clichés & 1 bad line break- so marked. But this poem is utterly flaccid, devoid of any energy. What we get is a mere recitation of the myth with a few banal post-feminist posturings: the need to tune out the world, the lies falling to the floor, etc. The last line, especially, is meant to invoke or evoke her mom’s devastating ability to turn an interesting phrase on a dime. Let’s scalpel this:
Medusa
In the very flesh of her scalp
Her eyes are, and you are stone
Even as you stand before her.
She opens and you believe.
She has more tongues to deceive
Than you can deafen your ears to.
If you could look away, the voices
Of her vipers would argue,
Would fall to the floor like a lie.
½ the length & quite a bit better, although still not a good poem - just passable with possibilities. Gone is the banality, & the compression aids in making this poem’s narrative more striking. As example we end with merely her snake head emoting. What? Don’t know, but there’s room for imbuement - not just the predictable pap of the original.
Let us, before we’re done, take a different tack, & compare FH’s take on this theme with the same titled poem her mother wrote. Here is Sylvia Plath’s Medusa:
Off that landspit of stony mouth-plugs,
Eyes rolled by white sticks,
Ears cupping the sea’s incoherences,
You house your unnerving head-God-ball,
Lens of mercies,
Your stooges
Plying their wild cells in my keel’s shadow,
Pushing by like hearts,
Red stigmata at the very center,
Riding the rip tide to the nearest point of departure,
Dragging their Jesus hair.
Did I escape, I wonder?
My mind winds to you
Old barnacled umbilicus, Atlantic cable,
Keeping itself, it seems, in a state of miraculous repair.
In any case, you are always there,
Tremulous breath at the end of my line,
Curve of water upleaping
To my water rod, dazzling and grateful,
Touching and sucking.
I didn’t call you.
I didn’t call you at all.
Nevertheless, nevertheless
You steamed to me over the sea,
Fat and red, a placenta
Paralysing the kicking lovers.
Cobra light
Squeezing the breath from blood bells
Of the fuchsia. I could draw no breath,
Dead and moneyless,
Overexposed, like an X-ray.
Who do you think you are?
A Communion wafer? Blueberry Mary?
I shall take no bite of your body,
Bottle in which I live,
Ghastly Vatican.
I am sick to death of hot salt.
Green as eunuchs, your wishes
Hiss at my sins.
Off, off, eely tentacle!
There is nothing between us.
Need I say that mom towers over daughter? Look at the imagery, descriptions, & the stark roiling narrative. Also look at the last lines. FH’s is deliberately melodramatic, whereas SP’s is a very banal seeming line- on its own. But coming in the context at the end of this harsh poem it startles by its ability to end the poem with a falling out of emotion. Ba-boom. This is the Plath style that so few of her critics & devotees notice- they focus just on the anger & personalisms. This is what FH also tries to mimic, & fails at, because that is not the reason her mom was a poetic titan- it was, indeed, for those little, subtler things. But, why should a painter be expected to see or understand that?
***
Frieda Hughes
published November 8th 1997 in The Guardian
Frieda is the daughter of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. She grew up with her father who protected her from the turmoil surrounding the death of Sylvia Plath. In an interview that was published in The Guardian together with this poem she said that until very recently she hadn’t read the poetry of her parents, nor had she read any of the numerous biographies concerning her mother. She has published a number of children’s books and acquired a reputation as a painter. She is married to a fellow painter, the Hungarian-born Laszlo Lukacs. She has now moved from Australia to London.
Frieda Hughes published her first collection of poetry titled ‘Wooroloo’ in October 1998. An article in TIME magazine (19th Oct) gives some more information.
Her second book of poetry - Stonepicker - was published in October 2001 by Bloodaxe Books. See an article she wrote for the Guardian about her writing and how she deals with her heritage. There are also three poems by her online at this site.
Hughes, Frieda: Stonepicker
Paperback - 80 pages (28 June, 2001), Bloodaxe Books; ISBN: 1852245646
Buy this book online at amazon.co.uk
Hughes, Frieda: Wooroloo
Paperback - 76 pages (February 1999), Bloodaxe Books; ISBN: 1852244968
Buy this book online at amazon.co.uk
Paperback - 64 pages (December 1999),HarperCollins; ISBN: 0060192712
Buy this book online at amazon.co.uk
Readers
by Frieda Hughes
Wanting to breathe life into their own dead babies
They took her dreams, collected words from one
Who did their suffering for them.
They fingered through her mental underwear
With every piece she wrote. Wanting her naked.
Wanting to know what made her.
Then tried to feather up the bird again.
The vulture with its bloody head
Inside its own belly,
Sucking up its own juice,
Working out its own shape,
Its own reason,
Its own death.
While their mothers lay in quiet graves
Squared out by those green cut pebbles
And flowers in a jam jar, they dug mine up.
Right down to the shells I scattered on her coffin.
They turned her over like meat on coals
To find the secrets of her withered thighs
And shrunken breasts.
They scooped out her eyes to see how she saw,
And bit away her tongue in tiny mouthfuls
To speak with her voice.
But each one tasted separate flesh,
Ate a different organ,
Touched other skin.
Insisted on being the one
Who knew best,
Who had the right recipe.
When she came out of the oven
They had gutted, peeled
And garnished her.
They called her theirs.
All this time I had thought
She belonged to me most.
***
Forty-Five by Frieda Hughes
Harper Collins 2006
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson
Sylvia Who?
Maybe if your parents’ names are Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, your editors feel compelled to gush no matter what.
Hughes’s fourth book of poems (third in the U.S.), Forty-Five, is a collection of forty-five short poems, each for a year of her life beginning with the year of her birth, 1960. She notes in her introduction that she also has a 225-foot-long abstract painting in forty-five panels that illustrates these years and compliments the poems. After having read the book, I think I’ll pass.
Though there are some nice lyric moments throughout the collection, by and large Hughes relies on the awful power of melodrama. Not to be confused with the perfectly-rendered dramatics of her mother, Hughes’s work plays all too often the pity card. She also chooses to note in her introduction that this collection represents many of the lower moments of her life because they are those that have mostly shaped her. This may be true for all of us and unfortunately, the constant focus on tragedy makes for a rather annoyed, and often bored, reader.
In the second poem, titled “Second Year 1961,” Hughes discusses crawling among things natural during her early years. An otherwise nice landscape, she tarnishes it with blatant illogic in the last two lines: “…a stump among them, / Taking root and learning my first words.” While it is a nice idea-taking root in the world of language-it just doesn’t make sense. Visually it works because a two year old would be short as a stump, but a stump is dying, its roots are receding, not “taking.” Is that the point? Whatever.
By the third poem the melodrama starts to pick up. Keep in mind the year is 1962-the year of Plath’s suicide-and Hughes is three years old:
I wanted to grow faster still,
Improve upon my verbal skill
And ask the questions plaguing me
All “skillful” rhyme aside, I don’t buy it. Ideally poets who’ve published four books haven’t been “plagued” by questions since their high-school journal entries. And three-year-olds aren’t “plagued” by questions of language. Confused at best. The other equally unimpressive moment of the poem deals with what one might excpect: “My mother, head in oven, died, / And me, already dead inside.” I don’t know what to say. Does this hearken back to the stump?
Each poem is one downer after another and though I’m first to admit I love a good downer, her hardships begin to read as pity-seeking hardships-unless you count frequent slips into pathetic fallacy and forced rhyme. So let me save you the trouble… Hughes’s first forty-five years consist of her mother’s suicide, undiagnosed dyslexia, weight issues leading to bulimia and anorexia, a car accident, her grandfather’s death, constant rejection by her step-mother, several cases of infidelity, divorce, nicotine addiction, endometriosis (!), her father’s death, and finally her car, which gets “crapped on by every bird in London”-metaphorically? Oh and she tragically tries to get away with her mother’s famous usage of the “D” word in “Forty First Year 2000”: “Daddy, Daddy, come and see / What she’s done to me.” No good.
Ultimately, Hughes’s frustration is rarely rendered in such a way that one can empathize, though she comes close in poems like “Fifteenth Year 1974” with the lines, “I wanted to climb right up out of myself / And fly off like dandelion fluff.” A few other lines that were exceptional: “To look after the strange animals / That children are,” “My first ghost wore a black and white / Flowered miniskirt,” “…between the barking geese / On the spine of the hill’s back,” and finally, perhaps the finest lines of the book, the one time when some lyric is sustained for more than the span of a few words:
And watch the dolphins and flying fish
Thread the wake as it melted
Back into the sea.
But most of this stuff is a bit too conscious of its target audience. That’s not to say she doesn’t have what it takes to employ a discerning, devilish eye-her intro to the new edition of Ariel was nice, anyway-but clearly the standards were too low here.
Also by Frieda Hughes:
Wooroloo
Waxworks
Stonepicker
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