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| Perseus isn't finished with Medusa until he turns his mother's suitor into stone. |
"Sappho" by Beth Hinchliffe. America magazine, 29 June 2023. This poem was a runner-up in the Jesuit magazine's annual poetry contest. Aurelia Plath's friend and neighbor, journalist and author of an unpublished Plath biography, Hinchliffe said this was the first poem she ever wrote.
"Cottage Street, 1953" by Richard Wilbur, first published in 1972, describes Aurelia and a very depressed Sylvia having tea at his mother-in-law Edna Ward's house on Cottage Street in Wellesley. Mrs. Ward was Aurelia's friend. Hear Wilbur read the poem (and defend it).
"Aurelia Plath Confesses" by Lisa Mullenneaux, published in Prairie Schooner, Vol. 93, No. 2, Summer 2019. Mullenneaux is a poet, scholar, translator, and professor of writing, best known for the essay "Can You Call Her Sister? Amelia Rosselli on Sylvia Plath."
"Medusa" by Sylvia Plath (1962).
Frieda Hughes wrote several poems about her grandmother Aurelia. You've probably read some. Here are quotations from four different poems:
1. "Mirror, mirror on the wall / Who is the least dead / Of us all?//
You loved me not, just saw / A copy of the face / You gave birth to."
2. "Come live with me!" it cried, / Nostrils spread above like nose wings / As if the face would take off from its neck-end / Like a ghastly bald crow."
3. "Chipping away at her / As if she were an egg, / to be broken and beaten / And turned into something else."
4. "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."
I think you get the gist.
Although Ted Hughes wrote at least one poem centered on Aurelia, Birthday Letters offers only glimpses. His poem "Night-Ride on Ariel" makes a typically chilling reference: "Mother / Making you dance with her magnetic eye / On your Daddy's coffin"
3 comments:
I like some of Frieda's paintings, but I have to say her poetry is not my cup of tea.
"Sappho" was quite interesting. Love this collection of poems!
Frieda's poetry is self-indulgent and god-awful. I've never understood her venom towards Aurelia. I know that as children, both she and Nick spent summers with Aurelia in Wellesley, but I can't imagine that she was anything but a kind and doting grandmother. Don't even get me started on Frieda's claim that she vividly remembers her grandmother encouraging Sylvia to get a divorce after the infamous Assia phone call to their home in Devon. She would have been about two and a half at the time. That's not even possible.
Frieda's is a sad story and I think she wants everyone to know that.
It's in "Ariel: The Restored Edition" (2004) that Frieda says Aurelia told Sylvia to order Ted out of the house [p. xiii]. Frieda in July 1962 was 27 months old. Possibly she retains an impression of a distressed Sylvia ordering Aurelia out of the house, which is what really happened. Aurelia moved in with Winifred Davies.
Frieda's foreword to "The Letters of Sylvia Plath Vol. II" (2017), clarifies that Ted Hughes chose to leave [p. xx] but again adds that Frieda "remembered the visit from my grandmother that summer in 1962, because it changed my life (another story) in the most dramatic way." [xxiv]. This story of sudden amnesia Frieda told as early as 2007 in her book "45," explaining to The Telegraph on 31 October 2015: "[Aurelia] wanted my mother to leave my father and her intention was he would come home and we would all be gone. That traumatised me so badly I sort of went blank and didn’t come round until I must have been nearly five," she says. "I remember going to the bakelite telephone and thinking, ‘I’ve got to phone for help’." Her fingers, though, were too small to dial, and anyway she didn’t have a number to call."
This amnesia meant Frieda did not remember worse traumas including her mother's suicide or her father taking a few days to consider letting Warren and Maggie Plath raise the children in the U.S. while he played around, or being cared for by a series of nannies and then, for two years, by Olwyn Hughes. In other interviews Frieda said Aurelia intended to "steal" the children, I guess by dragging them screaming onto a train and through London's airport. The children first visit the U.S. in 1967.
Not an easy life. In Frieda's work several transparently real people are villainized as craven, unloving, and corrupt. In that way her work is like Sylvia's.
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