FRIEDA Hughes, the daughter of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, has written a frank autobiographical book of poetry about the tragedies in her life. The terse and painful style of her work is remarkably like that of her mother.

Published last week in America before it appears in Britain in the spring, Forty-Five has 45 poems about each of the years of her life. The most poignant cover the suicide in 1963 of her mother, her discovery in her teens that her mother had taken her own life, and her father’s death from cancer in 1998.

She also writes movingly of her years of depression linked to the illness ME, and the rift with her stepmother who brought her up, caused by a dispute about Hughes’s will.

Al Alvarez, the poet and critic, who knew the couple from their time in London, said Frieda’s poems, published by HarperCollins, were reminiscent of her mother’s work: “In the past her poetry has been more flashy.”

Frieda, now married for the third time, says she did not read her parents’ poetry until her thirties, though she began writing poetry herself in private. She was 39 when her first volume, Wooroloo, was published.

Frieda then received £60,000 from the lottery body Nesta as a controversial grant to give her time to produce the book of poetry and an accompanying cycle of paintings. They will not go on display until the book is published by Bloodaxe in Britain.

In Third Year, Frieda writes about her mother’s death, when she was a two-year-old.

My mother, head in oven, died,
And me, already dead inside,
I was an empty tin
Where nothing rattled in.

During the 1960s Frieda and her brother Nicholas moved around Yorkshire, Devon and Ireland where her father, whose own poetry was frequently about the natural world, “taught me trees, and clouds and birds and animals”.

Badly injured in a car crash in 1978, Frieda married the following year at the age of 20. After a series of menial jobs, she began an art course.

It was as a second marriage fell apart that she felt the full effects of depression, anorexia and a cancer scare. She writes in the poem, Thirty-Third Year:

With friends or without
I was terminally lonely;
The void engulfed me.

In The Thirty-Fourth Year her depression is more physical:

My strength deserted me; my body
Crumpled beneath the weight
Of Chronic Fatigue.

By the following year she was diagnosed with ME, an illness that continued for several years. It was followed by a cancer scare and an operation on her colon.

By 1996 her father, who had been made poet laureate in 1984, was diagnosed with cancer. He died two years later, soon after publishing the love poems he had written to Plath.

Frieda writes in Thirty-Ninth Year:

My poetry was where I hid
When my father died. The crevasse in me
Opened up by my father’s death
Just wouldn’t close. Into it
Poured sympathy; bandages
Tossed into the bottomless well
Where I’d fallen.

After Hughes’s death, there were problems with her stepmother, Carol Hughes, whom Frieda felt had betrayed her. The rift was caused by a dispute over Frieda’s claim to a share of the copyright fees from her father’s poetry.

There was more depression, though by Forty-Fourth Year Frieda writes more positively:

I felt happiness now
At where I came from,
All the pain of loss
And being cast off
By those I’d loved as family
Was gone.

She ends this poem by writing:

The mother and father, who loved me, died,
But I still carry them inside
And in my quiet, mourn for them.

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