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Loading... Arielby Sylvia Plath
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. This woman's mad mind enthralls me. If asked to do a reading of her work, I wold always incdlude "Daddy," "Balloons," and "Cut.".There are few mad geniuses (geni?) and i have been in love with her prose since the 1960s. ( )A wonderfully crafted collection of poems from a woman of immense literary gift. I too first read this at a young angsty moment in my life, whilst simultaneosly empathising with Holden Caufield, yet despite this these poems are beautifully haunting. They speak for themselves. Let them speak to you. This was one dark chick. I read this book in the summer of 1997 when everything in my life was up in the air and I wasn't sleeping more than an hour or two a night and I wasn't eating and all I was doing was reading. And I had my wisdom teeth removed that summer. Creepy creepy. Come on, if you are a teenager suffering from any form of angst, this belongs on your bookshelf right next to Catcher. If you are a college student it probably already is there if you want to write. She is probably given a little more literary recognition than she is actually due, due to her young, unfortunate and untimely death, but she still can write circles around you bub. 0.077 seconds to build listing no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0060908904, Paperback)Sylvia Plath churned out her final poems at the remarkable rate of two or three a day, and Robert Lowell describes them as written by "hardly a person at all ... but one of those super-real, hypnotic, great classical heroines." Even more remarkable, she wrote them during one of the coldest, snowiest winters (1962-63) Londoners have ever known. Snowbound, without central heating, she and her two children spent much of their time sniffling, coughing, or running temperatures (In "Fever 103°" she writes, "I have been flickering, off, on, off on. / The sheets grow heavy as a lecher's kiss."). Pipes froze, lights failed, and candles were unobtainable.As if these physical privations weren't enough, Plath was out in the cold in another sense--her husband, Ted Hughes, had left her for another woman earlier that year. Despite all this (or perhaps because of it), the Ariel poems dazzle with their lyricism, their surprising and vivid imagery, and their wit. Rather than confining herself to her bleak surroundings, Plath draws from a wide array of experience. In "Berck-Plage," for instance, clouds are "electrifyingly-coloured sherbets, scooped from the freeze." In "The Night Dances," the poet stands crib-side, reveling in her son's own brand of do-si-do: "Such pure leaps and spirals--Surely they travel / The world forever, I shall not entirely / Sit emptied of beauties, the gift / Of your small breath..." Though at times they present the reader with hopelessness laid bare, these poems also teem with the brightest shards of a life, confounding those who merely look for the words of a gloomy, dispassionate suicide. Plath rose each morning in the final months of her life to "that still blue, almost eternal hour before the baby's cry" and left us these words like "axes/After whose stroke the wood rings..." (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:17 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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