cover image Wooroloo: Poems

Wooroloo: Poems

Frieda Hughes. HarperCollins Publishers, $20 (64pp) ISBN 978-0-06-019271-6

Like her father, Britain's poet laureate Ted Hughes, Hughes fille has written several children's books, but here she makes her poetic debut with this very Hughesianly titled collection (think of Ted's Wodwo). As with Birthday Letters, we are nearly forced into equating the poet with the author of some of these poems, such as ""The Farmer,"" which recounts a gentle ""tree-watching"" man's early marriage: ""Now her words/ Beat him down, he was harvested in his own fields./ His bruises bloomed, those blue roses sank their stain/ Beneath his surface, made him dumb with pain.// He learned to be silent.... At last, she left him."" One will not fail to recognize Frieda Hughes's mother, the late Sylvia Plath, in these lines, just as Plath's own mother is chastened in ""Granny"": ""You loved me not, just saw/ A copy of the face/ You gave birth to."" The book also makes use of Hughes pere's characteristic imagery: ""The fox chewed his thoughtful paw, gnawed/ At his own toes and knew his differences."" Elsewhere, a stark visceralism (""Dead Cow""; ""Caesarian""; ""Hysterectomy"") rehearses some of Plath's more vituperative tropes, particularly in ""Readers,"" concerning critics' attempts to reanimate Plath in their own works. Such adaptations would not be a problem in a stronger book. But while these and the closely descriptive, allegorical animal poems (""Fish""; ""Walrus""; ""Giraffes""--even ""Wife"" seems part of the menagerie) have a defiant way with an image, most prove hard to read outside of the Birthday Letters flap. (Oct.)