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Daughter of Ted Hughes feels a poem coming on in anger at wind farms 'destroying Wales'
Credit: by Sally Williams, Western Mail, www.walesonline.co.uk 21 May 2011 ~~
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The daughter of the late poet laureate Ted Hughes is to write a poem about the hundreds of giant pylons she believes will destroy her beautiful Mid Wales homeland.
Frieda Hughes, whose mother was American poet and novelist, Sylvia Plath, lives in Abermule in the Severn Valley near Welshpool.
The 51-year-old poet and painter believes plans for a 20-acre substation near her home and 100 miles of power cables carried on pylons linking 800 wind turbines in Montgomeryshire to the National Grid will turn the lush landscape into an eyesore.
She said she moved to the area after moving back from Australia when her father fell ill with cancer because it is “one of the most beautiful parts of the world”.
Describing the turbines as protruding like “homeless bits of aeroplane”, she can’t understand why nobody in the Assembly is preventing the “vandalism of the countryside”.
“This is about to disfigure Wales,” she said.
“If we are blessed with an attribute that is as sought after and has value in all things – from our well-being, health and quality of life – why destroy it for something as ineffective as wind power?
“It is not as if there are not other alternatives such as tidal power and solar power.
“Wind farms are subsidy-driven and are quick to put up.
“But the visual cost of the plans far outweigh any benefits from wind power; we simply shouldn’t have wind farms.
“I am working on a poem about the issue now.
“The trouble is that a poem is not the type of thing one should write in anger, otherwise it comes out as a rant.
“When I moved here in 2004, I was concerned that, being so beautiful, Mid Wales might become too heavily populated, but if we do not stop the turbines, pylons and the hub, I will not have to worry. Nobody will want to live here. Not even us.
“Wales is hugely dependent on its tourist industry, so it seems ridiculous that this extraordinarily beautiful countryside is being permanently disfigured in front of our eyes by the very policymakers who are supposed to be its custodians.”
She criticised the controversial wind farms policy Tan 8 describing it as “out of date”.
She said: “The beauty and welfare of our environment should never be under-estimated but people undermine it all the time.
“People can choose to live in an industrial area but when we choose to live in the countryside we don’t expect industrial areas to come to us.”
Ms Hughes, who divorced Hungarian artist Laszlo Lukacs last year, is renovating a Georgian home that was once converted into flats, one of which was lived in by the late writer Beryl Bainbridge’s brother Ian.
Her father Ted Hughes was one of the twentieth century’s greatest nature poets.
In 1956 he married Sylvia Plath.
The couple moved to the United States in 1957, the year that his first volume of verse, The Hawk in the Rain, was published.
Other works soon followed, including the highly praised Lupercal (1960) and Selected Poems (1962).
Hughes stopped writing poetry almost completely for nearly three years after Plath’s suicide in 1963 (the couple had separated earlier).
But he went on to publish prolifically, with volumes of poetry such as Wodwo (1967), Crow (1970), Wolfwatching (1989), and New Selected Poems, 1957-1994 (1995).
In his Birthday Letters (1998), he addressed his relationship with Plath after decades of silence.
In 1984, he was appointed Britain’s poet laureate.
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