February 06, 1998 | R emember how we picked the daffodils?
Nobody else remembers, but I remember.
Your daughter came with her armfuls, eager and happy.
Helping the harvest. She has forgotten.
She cannot even remember you. And we sold them.
It sounds like sacrilege, but we sold them.
("Daffodils")

On the dust jacket of Ted Hughes' "Birthday Letters" is a photographic detail of the floral embroidery on a shawl made in northern India. The product of a long tradition of needlework by men, the shawls of Kashmir are made of fine wool stitched with intricately detailed paisley or floral patterns in deep colors -- reds, blues, greens, pinks, golds. If you turn one over, you'll see on its underside the messy, knotted shadow of the finished work. Turn it over to its right side and the shawl is precisely and minutely embroidered over its entire surface, embellished by a graceful design of curving lines, leaves and flowers.

Even more richly patterned than a Kashmir shawl -- made by a man, an adornment for a woman -- the "Birthday Letters" is a collection of poems into which Ted Hughes has stitched words, phrases and images from Sylvia Plath's poetry and from the complexity that was their marriage. Hughes' decision to break his long silence about Plath by creating a poetic counterpoint to Plath's work and experience makes it easy to draw two possible conclusions about the book. One is that Hughes' new work is, simply, a valentine to his dead wife, who, swamped by "the unthinkable old despair and the new agony" ("Visit"), ended her own life 35 years ago this month. The second conclusion, crass and ultimately ludicrous but the one likely to be drawn by the people who have for three decades called him a murderer, is that Hughes has finally "silenced" Sylvia Plath by folding her words into his own. Yet "Birthday Letters" has a far more profound purpose than either of those offered by a clean side/messy side polarity, which Hughes makes clear on the book's dedication page. The poems in "Birthday Letters" are for Frieda and Nicholas Hughes, the two children Plath left behind.