Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #305267 in Books
• Published on: 1975-09-15
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 55 pages

Review
A great deal of the power of Sylvia Plath's poems has to do with destiny. Not destiny as the donnee relating to her subsequent suicide, but destiny as a philosophical or psychological equation. Character is destiny, says Heraclitus. A woman's body is her destiny, says Freud. In the miraculous posthumously published poems written in the last years of her life, of which Winter Trees is the latest installment, Sylvia Plath continually confronts her complex biology and fierce temperament and seems continually affronted by both. "There are the clothes of a fat woman I do not know./ There is my comb and brush./ I am so vulnerable suddenly./ I am a wound walking out of a hospital./ I am a wound that they are letting go." It is her own particular sexual vulnerability and her transcendent awareness of the nature of things ("That is that, that is that," she keeps insisting) which gives a terrifically prophetic aura to her voice, her lines and images, the stark and restless landscape over which she travels with such intensity, a landscape seductively beckoning to her for a further advance or a terrifying descent. Though opposites clash and mangle one another, though her humiliating hatreds and loves are so immediately present as to seem almost deranged, the Heraclitean and Freudian strains do finally fuse in Sylvia Plath's work - as of course they could never do in her life. This contradiction is what her poems are "about," but it is the triumph of that fusion, a triumph of craft and dazzling discrimination, which gives her poems their real "meaning." Women's Lib is not wrong to be claiming her as a heroine. Certainly she is topical. But beneath the needs of the moment is a timeless resonance which shall surely reverberate for years to come. (Kirkus Reviews)

Customer Reviews

Not Plath's best, but a certain must-read.
Winter Trees is a collection of nineteen poems, all of which, bar one, were written during the last nine months of Plath's life. The poems "are all out of the batch from which the Ariel poems were more or less arbitrarily chosen".

Some of the poems in the collection are weak; but the majority are as beautiful and disturbing as her other works.

The poems are demanding, but rewards are poured on the reader. The last poem "Three Women, A Poem for Three Voices", which was described as a "bridge between The Collosus and Ariel", is long but not tedious.

The poem "Child" is, in my opinion, one of Plath's best. In the last stanza you will find yourself wondering how Plath manages to make something so dark so beautiful. It features the theme of Plath's relationship with her children, which is as much a recurring theme as much as how Plath views her role in society.

All in all, definitely not Plath's best poetry, but a certain must-read.