Wonderful! Peter Stothard at the Times responds to my post from last week, by reproducing the full text of his 1998 Ted Hughes commemorative, "The Poet Laureate's Last Reading."
Mr. Stothard recommends Wagner's Ariel's Gift for a "sensitive and balanced" explication of Hughes' Birthday Letters to Plath, which is, I think, exactly what I was asking for, falling just shy of some way to posthumously debate the merits of Reed's poetry with Mr. Hughes.