Available September 2003 1-55380-010-9 BISAC: POE005000, BIO007000  6 x 9 130 pp $14.95 pb  Poetry, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes

One of the greatest mad, sad literary love affairs of the 20th century was that between poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. In her collection of poems, Hurdle adapts her own research on their lives to explore the love and loss in this relationship of poetic collaboration and rivalry, which lasts, in Hurdle's recreation, even after Plath's suicide in 1963 and Hughes' death in 1998. At points, the poet-narrator forms a literary ménage à trois with the two poets as she struggles obsessively to understand their own lives as individual artists and their love-torn relationship. In the final sections, the envious poet-narrator loses her privileged place as the lover of both Ted and Sylvia. Other voices, including those of family members, a late night talk show host, a holocaust survivor, and literary critics, address Plath, whose poetry has now entered the wider public domain. For the reader, there is the great joy of finding familiar images from both Plath and Hughes, but images that echo with a new resonance:

The clock ticks.
Outside no star shines
And the thought-fox screams its abandonment
as it circles
three-legged and bloody
in the snow.

"In this book of linked poems, Crystal Hurdle channels the many voices that comprise the hardest, brightest stars in the constellation of Sylvia Plath's life. The tenderness and the tensions between Plath and her husband, poet Ted Hughes, are empathetically delineated, as is the profound linguistic influence of Plath's mother, Aurelia. This is an accomplished first book that combines scholarly and poetic responses to Sylvia Plath's life and work." — Sharon Thesen

Crystal Hurdle was born in Zwiebrucken, Germany and grew up in Ottawa, Ontario and Victoria, British Columbia, where she obtained a BA and MA in English. Since 1985 she has been teaching Creative Writing and English Literature and Composition at Capilano College in North Vancouver. Her poetry has been widely published in Canadian journals, including Canadian Literature, The Dalhousie Review and The Capilano Review. As a featured speaker, she read a number of her Plath/Hughes poems at the international Plath Symposium at the University of Indiana in the fall of 2002. With her husband she presently makes her home in North Vancouver.