Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes (Faber, £7.99 in UK)

The story of Ted Hughes must be one of the saddest in literature. The Plath legacy has overshadowed his work and left him in the role of brooding villian. This was compounded by the suicide of his mistress Assia Wevill who died taking with her their small daughter. Admirers also criticised Hughes for accepting the post of poet laureate. At the end of his life he chose to break his silence about the Plath years with this moving, personal, honest and often brilliant collection of which all but two poems directly address Plath and her ghosts. Last year's Whitbread Book of the Year, it followed his finest work, the magnificent Tales From Ovid.