"in bed, he smells like a butcher."

The Red Cross, originally uploaded by magic fly paula.

Would make a great book title, wouldn't it? Just reading it, I can
feel the plot unfolding in my head--and I've already developed a strong antipathy to the man who comes to bed smelling of blood.

But in reality, this isn't a book title. It's a quote from Assia Weevil, describing her famous lover, Ted Hughes. Whether the butcher in question is one of poetry's most despicable cads or just the victim of his own lust for despairing women, I don't know.

What I do know is that we would never have heard of Assia Weevil if she hadn't been the "other woman" in the love triangle that unhinged Sylvia Plath and led to her tragic suicide.

As both a wife and an admirer of Plath's fiercely beautiful poems and the eager-for-life voice that permeates her diaries, I'm disinclined to have much sympathy for Assia. The bizarre murder-suicide she committed a few years later, involving her own four year old daughter only increases that disinclination.

Now a full scale biography probes the life of the woman whose only claim to fame was her fatal connection to Plath and Hughes. This morning's Guardian rehashed some of it's salient points. (Hughes moved his new lover into his dead wife's bed two days after her death.)

A Lover of Unreason: The Biography of Assia Weevil by Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negav, it is called if anyone is interested. It remains a story so packed with melodrama and stunning ironies that if it were a novel, it would be rejected as unbelievable.

No wonder so many of us, fans of one or both of the poets, have developed such strong emotions about it. For years, Plath fans, outraged by Hughes' destruction of the diaries which detailed his betrayal, have raged against him. But Hughes, too, has had his supporters--including his and Plath's daughter, Frieda. It wasn't his fault Sylvia was crazy, the argument seems to go.

The only thing that remains certain to those of us outside the story is what we lost: the poems and novels that might have been written by a brilliant, impassioned thirty-two year old woman who had just begun to tap into her full power.

For those, I still grieve.