A literary landmark when published last year - the first time Ted Hughes had publically articulated his feelings about Sylvia Plath, their relationship and her suicide - made all the more poignant by the poet laureate's own death in October 1998. Paperback publication will be a major event, the hardback has sold over 100,000 copies in the UK. "Even if it were possible to set aside its biographical value... its linguistic, technical and imaginative feats would guarantee its future. Hughes is one of the most important poets of the century and this is his greatest book" Andrew Motion, "The Times".

With just two exceptions, these 88 poems, in the form of an intimate and candid narrative, are addressed to Sylvia Plath, the American poet to whom Ted Hughes was married. They were written over a period of more than 25 years, the first a few years after her suicide in 1963.