Erica Wagner has set the poems of Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters in the context of his marriage to Sylvia Plath with great delicacy . . . Her book is informed not only by Plath’s journals and letters, but, more significantly, moonlit throughout by Plath’s poetry.’ Times Literary Supplement ‘A commentary on Birthday Letters, gravely unfurling the biographical journey for which these most openly personal of poems are signposts, amplifying and interpreting.’ The Scotsman