When Ted Hughes s Birthday Letters was published in 1998 it was greeted with astonishment and acclaim immediately landing on the bestseller list. Few suspected that Hughes had been at work for a quarter of a century on this cycle of poems addressed to his first wife Sylvia Plath. In Ariel s Gift Erica Wagner explores the destructive relationship between these two poets through their lives and their writings. She provides a commentary to the poems in Birthday Letters showing the events that shaped them and crucially showing how they draw upon Plath s own work. Both narratively engaging and scholastically comprehensive. --Thomas Lynch Los Angeles Times Wagner has set the poems of Hughes s Birthday Letters in the context of his marriage to Plath with great delicacy. --Times Literary Supplement