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| Frieda Hughes working on an owl painting in her studio |
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| Screenshots from The Who's movie, 'Tommy' |
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| The Book of Mirrors |
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| WHO are you?! |
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| Frieda with her father and brother |
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| Directed by Brad Bird |
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| Directed by Brad Bird also |
THE BLAST FROM THE PAST
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| THE BLAST FROM THE PAST shop in Tomorrowland |
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| First edition cover, published under Sylvia Plath's pseudonym, "Victoria Lucas." |
Her mother was one of the most influential poets of the century and her father was the British poet laureate from 1984 until his death.
Her mother died by suicide when Frieda was almost three; her father died of myocardial infarction in 1998.
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| Frieda Hughes with Luna earrings? |
"Frieda Hughes is thumbing through her first book of poetry, trying to find the poem she wrote about the poems her father, Ted Hughes, wrote about her mother, Sylvia Plath.
“It’s called Birds.
It describes the poet as a penguin, nursing the egg his wife has left him, and the skuas that kill and feed on baby penguins.
I wrote it about my father and Birthday Letters [the collection of poems Hughes wrote in response to Plath’s suicide].
But when my father read it, he said he thought it was a poem about me.
I look at it now and think he’s right.”
Her voice, as she reads the poem aloud, is deep and low; eerily resonant of the voice of her mother, who was recorded reading her Ariel poems a few months before her death.
Her voice, as she reads the poem aloud, is deep and low; eerily resonant of the voice of her mother, who was recorded reading her Ariel poems a few months before her death.
She gassed herself in an oven in the middle of the night, leaving out bread and milk as breakfast for the sleeping Frieda and her one-year-old brother.
Frieda was almost three at the time. She is 56 now and we are sitting by the fire in the lounge of her old Welsh farmhouse, eating delicious homemade banana cake and drinking tea.
Frieda was almost three at the time. She is 56 now and we are sitting by the fire in the lounge of her old Welsh farmhouse, eating delicious homemade banana cake and drinking tea.
Every inch of every wall is covered with her dramatic, large oil paintings of birds and abstract shapes.
Her father loved her paintings, she says.
Her father loved her paintings, she says.
He also liked her poetry and encouraged her to write, although she didn’t allow him to read any of her poems until she was 34.
By then, she had been secretly writing poetry for a decade, filing it away in a shoebox.
“I came to him with a stack of my poetry that was several inches high and asked him to put them into three piles: good, bad and indifferent.
And he did – he put several into each category.
He was quite good at being impartial and, with poetry, he was supremely impartial."
True North (Star)?
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| Frieda shares her birthday with the late Debbie Reynolds |
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| 'Bird 1' painted by Frieda Hughes |
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| Finding True North? |
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| Raven - oil on canvas and wood. Frieda Hughes |
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| 'Bird Beak Rock' by Frieda Hughes |
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| The Idea of Words - oil on canvas and wood by Frieda Hughes |
I only came across Pete Townshend's book 'Who I Am' by a shear act of synchronicity when I was passing through the town of Cooma on my first of three road-trips down the east coast of Australia this year -
What is it with Pop Culture and Aliens?
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| The table in Cooma I found Pete Townshend's book on |
But the weird thing is that Frieda's paintings just about sum up my travels across Australia this year bizarrely.
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| 'White Rabbit' by Frieda Hughes |
It wasn't until my second and third road-trips last year that I would keep running into real live rabbits in some very bizarre places.
A Cascade of Rabbits?
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| Rabbits and rabbit-holes running along the rivulet parklands in Tasmania |
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| A white rabbit at a black swan event in Canberra on my 3rd road-trip |
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| A pelican getting ready for a black swan attack in Canberra |
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| 'Black Swans at Lake Grace, WA 3' by Frieda Hughes |
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| A young woman I met in the town of Grafton who had a rabbit with her |
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| 'Black and White Rabbit 1' by Frieda Hughes |
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| The Grafton Bridge across the Clarence River in Grafton |
Grafton is the town 'Cold Chisel' wrote about in their song 'Flame Trees'.
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| 'Australian Christmas Tree' by Frieda Hughes |
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| An Australian Christmas Tree? |
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| My father's ashes were scattered under this tree in 2016 |
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| 'POTENTIAL' by Frieda Hughes |
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