AustLit

'Frieda Hughes's fable-like poems draw on her early years in Devon and Yorkshire, a lifelong engagement with nature and itinerant wildlife, and later experiences when living in Australia, London, and most recently, Wales. They cast light on two worlds, giving a mythic dimension to contemporary life – depicting with an artist’s keen eye the particular nature of beast, fish and fowl. Strange creatures, fabled beings and inner voices come to life in startling poems set both in city streets and hospitals as well as in psychic landscapes and reinvented tales.

'Out of the Ashes brings together work from four collections: Wooroloo (1999), Stonepicker (2001), Waxworks (2002) and The Book of Mirrors (2009). These show a progressive peeling back of the layers of metaphor and allegory as the reader travels a road into a world informed by increasingly personal experiences and memories, through which the poet has been tested, challenged, and found new direction.

'The book takes the reader on a journey through a life – Frieda's poems examining the ideas of argument, resolution and the acceptance of what cannot be changed. They include poems relating to the death of her father, Ted Hughes, and the loss of her brother Nicholas to suicide at 47, as well as recollections of adolescence following a childhood affected by the loss of her mother, Sylvia Plath. The selection excludes poems from Forty-five (2006), available in the US from HarperCollins, and Alternative Values: poems & paintings (2015), published separately by Bloodaxe.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Frieda Hughes’s poems and paintings reflect her early years in Devon and Yorkshire, and her later experiences when living in London, Australia, and most recently, Wales. From childhood, writing and painting have been the two driving forces behind her commitment to life. They first came together in her illustration of two of her seven published children’s books, and through her cartoons – she was cartoonist for the West Australian Magazine when living in Western Australia in the early 90s.

'In 2002 Frieda Hughes received a NESTA Award to undertake her work on Forty-five, a summary of her life to that age in 45 poems and a 225 foot long, 4 foot high, 45 panel abstract depicting the emotional landscape of her life. This was the beginning of a growing collaboration between her poetry and her artwork, which is now further realised in Alternative Values, which includes 60 full-colour plates of both her abstract and her semi-figurative work. The paintings were shown at the Belgravia Gallery, London, where the book was launched in October 2015.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.