It's so hard to separate this book - a memoir in poetry, almost - from the mythos of Hughes's life with his wife Sylvia Plath. Honestly, he seems as if he was a terrible husband, but he was emphatically not a terrible poet. The first half of this book, especially, is outstanding. I was all set to give it five stars. But it just kept going on and on, an endless vivisection of... not grief, exactly, although grief is certainly there. Obsession, perhaps? A preoccupation with missed chances, surely. So much of what makes the first half so strong is the looming sense of premonition (seeded in, of course, with the benefit of hindsight).

Plath comes across, in nearly every poem, as someone highly emotional, and her profound depression seeps into every poem. I think she would be very hard to live with, if this is accurate. And while that doesn't excuse Hughes' actions, of course, I might feel more sympathetic to him if there was more of him grappling with his actions in a capacity other than observer. I mean, surely he must have felt monstrous levels of guilt, and the guilt is there, in a sort of screaming Why didn't I see how bad it was, how could I have missed it? way. Which is enormously understandable; I think most people who have lost someone to suicide grapple with how much to blame themselves, and how much to blame others. But then there is the rest. Even the best husband can't ward off mental illness in their wife, of course, but Hughes was not the best husband. I don't know their lives well enough to tease out all the layers of meaning in these poems, but that single poem about his mistress... is it my desire to see blood spilled over pages here, a disemboweling, public reaching for redemption, or is it a genuine feeling that Hughes' capacity for observation is focused more outward than inward? I'm not entitled to an explanation, of course, and nor is anyone else, but for me the second half does not quite reach the heights of the first.