Product Description

Sylvia Plath (1932-63) possessed one of the most commanding voices in twentieth-century poetry. She published only one volume of verse, "The Colossus", during her life and a single novel, "The Bell Jar". After her death "Winter Trees", "Crossing the Water" and, most notably, the remarkable poems in "Ariel", brought her both posthumous fame and a readership that continues today. Subsequently, her "Collected Poems" won the Pulitzer Prize and, on publication, her Journals provided an insight into the life that was the basis for her work. Other volumes in this series, include: "Auden", "Betjemen", "Eliot", "Hughes", and "Yeats".

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #29207 in Books
• Published on: 2009-05-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 80 pages

About the Author
Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and studied at Smith College. In 1955 she went to Cambridge University on a Fulbright scholarship, where she met and later married Ted Hughes. She published one collection of poems in her lifetime, The Colossus (1960), and a novel, The Bell Jar (1963). Her Collected Poems, which contains her poetry written from 1956 until her death, was published in 1981 and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

Customer Reviews

A Must Have for Any Plath Fan
If you are thinking about purchasing this tape and are a Plath fan, I urge you to stop just thinking about it, and buy it! It is worth the money, and worth the time to wait for it to arrive in the mail. Sylvia Plath reads her own work so well, and with such clarity that you will probably never look at poetry the same way. Listening to them is like listening to stories, especially so on side B of the tape where she reads from her later works including "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus." Side A is her earlier work, her heavily structured poems, and crisp voice. Each word is pronounced so exactly correct, it does tend to get a little annoying. I do not listen to Side A as much as side B, let's just say that. You can hear the different sound so well between the two that it seems like two seperate people. The one "in plaster" and the one without.

Buy it! :)

De profundis
There are poems here to warm your heart, and others to chill your blood. As an example of the former, the 1957 poem "Sow" is a celebration of the muddiness and bloodiness of thriving, procreating life, redolent of the optimistic romanticism of Wordsworth or Robert Graves. When we get to the later recordings, on side two, the poet's nerve ends are raw-exposed. "Daddy", with its dark and terrible imagery - "Every woman adores a fascist, the boot in the face..." - makes you wonder exactly how her father, who died when she was a child, behaved toward her. That and "Lady Lazarus" are about as dark as poetry can get. Not every poet is the best reader of their work, but Plath conveys her agony in these recordings in a way that surely no one else could. If you are prepared to probe the very centres of poetic pain, get this tape.

A Classic
To celebrate Faber and Faber's 80th anniversary this selection of Sylvia Plath's poetry has been re-issued with a new hardcover. This is the first time that I have read any of her poetry, I had only read her brilliant semi-autobiographical novel before, The Bell Jar.

Sylvia Plath was a proponent of the school of confessional poetry, thus you will find some semi-autobiographical poems here. Although I thoroughly appreciate that her poetry isn't everyones cup of tea, indeed some of these poems I had to read a couple of times to get the full meaning of them, they are very good. This selection of her poems was selected by her estranged husband Ted Hughes, and contains 45 poems; amongst them are Daddy, Ariel,Tulips and of course Wuthering Heights. Never having read any of her poetry before I had heard of these ones, the others I hadn't so I don't really know what her most famous are.

All these poems show that she had the mastery of her subject, strongly using metaphor to build up something very visual as you read through them. In her lifetime she only had one volume of poetry published, but this selection covers those that were published after her sad death. The poems here are placed in the chronological order that they were first written in. Ideally reading this you will need some quiet time, too much distraction and you won't be able to completely grasp and take in the quality and sheer mastery of them.