I’m convinced of it, but of course I know how it looks,
the oven, the gas, the history of clinical depression.
Incontrovertible evidence shows she’d left her husband,
taken their kids to London to live in a flat once lived in
by W.B. Yeats. But cigarette packets come with
the clear warning ‘Smoking Kills’, and yet
not one smoker has ever been accused of suicide.
Sylvia Plath didn’t kill herself, she died of Ted Hughes.
Leaving his tyranny never meant she wouldn’t die of him,
and after her, their son Nicholas died of his father,
even when the evidence showed he hanged himself.
Assia Wevill, Hughes’ girlfriend, with whom
he’d conducted an affair, if we are to judge it by
just the forensic evidence, killed herself also, and took
her four-year-old daughter with her into that death.
No coroner in the land would have determined
the cause of death, in any case, to be Ted Hughes,
and yet smoking cigarettes absolutely is suicide.
Edward O’Dwyer is a secondary school teacher from Limerick, Ireland, writing both poetry and fiction. He has three collections of poetry – Exquisite Prisons (2022), Bad News, Good News, Bad News (2017), and The Rain on Cruise’s Street (2014), all from Salmon Poetry. The poem featured here is taken from his forthcoming collection, A Brief Apocalypse (2027). He has published two short story collections, Cheat Sheets (Truth Serum Press, 2018) and The Man Who Became Poems (Limerick Writers’ Centre, 2023). He is most recently the author of Rejection Letters (Truth Serum Press, 2025), a collection comically and imaginatively exploring the relationship between poets and poetry journal editors. He is the current Poet Laureate of Adare, elected by Poetry Ireland.