from One Poet's Notes

When I heard the sad news yesterday
about the suicide of Nicholas Hughes,
the 47-year-old son of Sylvia Plath
and Ted Hughes, I found it difficult to
connect the man that had become
a successful ecologist—who specialized
for more than two decades in studies
of salmon behavior and their patterns
of feeding or who held a position
as professor of fisheries
and ocean sciences at the University
of Alaska, Fairbanks—with the images
of him depicted as the infant son
in the Plath volumes on one of my bookshelves.
Like many others, until now my familiarity
with Nicholas Hughes existed solely
from information in Plath’s poetry
and her journals.