Out of the Ashes

Frieda Hughes

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781780374031
• eBook ISBN: 9781780374048
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

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.

FROM

The Book of Mirrors

(2009)

The Book of Mirrors

The book of mirrors is waiting for faces to fill it;

Polished chrome or pools of mercury

Are not so demanding. Each page

A flat conduit for whatever images

Are directed into it, sending them back

To the glassy eye of the beholder; a mirror

Communicating objects and people

To another mirror. Stripped of artifice or disguise

It gives us back to ourselves

As we really are; it does not recognise

The means by which we layer ourselves

In all manner of fakery.

The book of mirrors does not hold prisoners,

Although it may expose the cage

Of our own constructions.

If we are ready

It may illuminate the door over our left shoulder

Through which we can escape,

Leaving our old skins behind

For others to trip over.

The book of mirrors is always found by the roadside,

Or on a coffee table in a hospital waiting room,

Or on bookshelves belonging to someone

Who has recently died. It is

Upholstered in brown suede

– As if softened calf skin

Could lessen the possibility

Of being made to bleed by a careless grasp.

The book of mirrors is also a book of memories,

It plays us back to ourselves

So that if we care to look

We can see ourselves as others did,

But it does not make judgements

As others might.

The book of mirrors does not reflect

What is artificial or illusory.

If it shows us no reflection at all

Then our disguise is so complete

That whatever we once were

Is lost, and cannot be brought back.

And the book of mirrors does not care.

Stonepicker and the Book of Mirrors

Stonepicker has been collecting wounds as pebbles,

Stopping often to study a stone in the road

For the slight it might have

Inadvertently subjected her to. Taking

No offence where none is meant

Would devoid her of purpose,

So she must find some insult in it.

And there it is, the book of mirrors,

Lying on the verge and begging,

Just begging to be opened

But only because it is shut.

With enquiring fingers

She lifts the brown suede cover

To discover why it was left behind;

And there she is, naked on all of the pages,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Description
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Out of the Ashes
• from WOOROLOO (1999)
• from STONEPICKER (2001)
• from WAXWORKS (2002)
• from THE BOOK OF MIRRORS (2009)
• Notes
• About the Author
• Copyright