Waxworks by Frieda Hughes

Waxworks by Frieda Hughes

New terrain is marked in Frieda Hughes's brilliant new collection, Waxworks. In it, Hughes has conceived and created a kind of poetic wax museum. She peoples it with figures from myth and legend, the Bible and world history, the famous and the infamous.

Diverse personalities, such as Rasputin and Cinderella, Medea and Lazarus, Houdini and Lady Macbeth, have been reborn of their old selves in Waxworks. Hughes imbues them with new life in contemporary terms; they experience the universal truths of love and pain and vanity that affect us all. As this volume proves, Hughes never flinches from difficult subjects and experiences.

Like Wooroloo, Frieda Hughes's debut collection, the poems of Waxworks will haunt a reader's imagination.

Frieda Hughes is a painter and poet who was born in London in 1960. She has also written children's books and was a poetry columnist for The Times (London) from 2006 to 2008. Wooroloo, Frieda's first collection of poetry, was named after the town in western Australia where she lived in the 1990s. Stonepicker, Waxworks, Forty-five, a collection of autobiographical poems based on her life up to the age of forty-five, The Book of Mirrors, and Alternative Values were among her other collections. Frieda combined the two driving forces in her life by using the theme of her poetry to inform the accompanying abstract images--painted in oils on canvas--in this last book.

Her work has also featured in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The London Magazine, The Times (London), and The Spectator (London), among other publications. Frieda lives in Wales, surrounded by owls and motorcycles.