Ryan-Bryant, author of Post-Jazz Poetics: A Social History, focuses on ways Plath and Hughes influenced each other’s ars poetica, arguing that both writers wrestled with the role of poetry and approaches to craft as visible in their compositional techniques and through recurring themes in their writing. Ryan-Bryant nods to biographical and social contexts while foregrounding archival research and textual analysis. The introduction provides an extensive, instructive literature review of Plath and Hughes studies, effectively showing how this book provides a nuanced perspective regarding the interplay and affinities between the two writers…. The book is clear, thoughtful, and fresh, recognizing the conversations between the two poets as a way of hearing each poet more clearly.Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.
— Choice Reviews
Significantly contributing to the literary-critical and archival-based scholarship in both Plath studies and Hughes studies, Jennifer Ryan-Bryant’s Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and the Writing Between Them: Turning the Table focuses our attention in compelling fashion on Hughes’s and Plath’s poetry and attendant poetics, histories, and contexts, while offering new readings of poems spanning the poets’ careers in the process. This book will be of great interest to readers and scholars who want to know more about how various poetry collections by Plath and Hughes came into being and how we can conceptualize Plath’s and Hughes’s ars poeticas within the contexts of their own and each other’s bodies of work.
— Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick, Indiana University-Purdue University Columbus
In Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Writing Between Them: Turning the Table, Jennifer Ryan-Bryant presents us with nuanced readings of the work of these two poets. She deftly examines the collaboration between Hughes and Plath, illuminating the ways in which these two writers influenced one another personally and professionally. Ryan-Bryant’s work significantly contributes to the breath of scholarship about these two literary geniuses.
— Caroline J. Smith, George Washington University