Rating: 
Summary: The Best of the Best!
Review: I love poetry, and this every poetry lover's fantasy. Having a volume of one of the best poet's ever almost complete collection. This is a book that I treasure, all the poems are masterpieces, and so beautiful. No one will ever write or think like Sylvia Plath again. This is a must-have for all of her fans. I own many poetry volumes--and this has to be my favorite. I would definitely recommend this--it was well deserving of 5 stars, and even people who aren't big fans of poetry have no choice but to love "The Collected Poems" by Sylvia Plath.
Rating:
Summary: Some of America's most thrilling and difficult poetry
Review: I've come across cheap hardback editions of nearly every Plath book over the years. I always come home from the bookstore emptyhanded and open my dog-eared softcover copy of The Collected Poems and re-read or memorize a favorite.This is great poetry with superior annotation and a terse, telling introduction by the late Ted Hughes. Every student of poetry should own this volume.
Rating:
Summary: A desert island book!
Review: If I could only have one book the rest of my life, this would be it. Sylvia Plath's way with words is just magical. I find new phrases and fascinating thoughts every time I open this book. Words cannot express my admiration for this woman.
Rating:
Summary: Looooooove Sylvia!...
Review: It doesn't matter what you think about Sylvia Plath; her suicides, dependence on Ted Hughes, the relationship she had with her mother, her poems about "Daddy, the very depth of the darkness she held inside. It doesn't matter a damn. What matters is the writing, the beauty of the words, the music in her voice.
"The Collected Poems" won the Pulitzer. Some may disagree with this choice, but what do they know. Sylvia was a genius.
The poems are from 1956-1963... "Southern Sunrise" 1956
SP uses the imagery of color- lemon,mango, peach, pinapple barked, green crescent of palms, quartz clear, blue drench, red watermelon sun. One can see she was happy when she wrote this poem. (Probably just met Ted)
"Fiesta Melons" 1956
Bright green and thumpable/Laced over With stripes/
Of turtle-dark green/Choose an egg shape/ a world shape/
Bowl one homeward to taste/ in the whitehot noon I find it interesting how much SP's poems reveal about her state of mind as she wrote them. One can observe the progression of depression, her troubled marriage and lonliness, especially in the later poems 1960-63... "Tulips" 1961
I am nobody/I have nothing to do with explosions.
I didn't want any flowers/I only wanted/to lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty. "The Rival" 1961(About Ted??)
I wake to a mausoleum; you are here/Ticking your fingers on the marble table/looking for cigarettes/Spiteful as a woman, but not so nervous/ And dying to say something unanswerable. The Moon and the Yew Tree" 1961
Separated from my house by a row of headstones/ I simply cannot see where there is to get to. "A Birthday Present" 1962 (SP's struggle w/depression)
I would have killed myself gladly that time any possible way/Now there are these veils, shimmering like curtains./
The diaphanous satins of a January window/White as babies' bedding and glittering with dead breath. O ivory! "Lesbos" 1962 (SP's experimentation w/ lesbianism??)
You say your husband is just no good to you/His Jew Mama guards his sweet sex like a pearl/You have one baby, I have two/I should sit on a rock off Cornwall and comb my hair./ I should wear tiger pants, /I should have an affair/ We should meet in another life,/ we should meet in air/ Me and you. People are fascinated w/ SP, her confessional poetry, giving us a glimse into her world. We feel as if we know her. And even though she appears strong and nasty at times, we see the sweetness behind it all, the lonliness, and somehow, like Marilyn Monroe, we would have liked to be her friend. 1962-63 were Sylvia's darkest days and it shows in her poetry... "Sheep in Fog"
The hills step off into whiteness/People or stars/
Regard me sadly,/ I disapoint them.
All morning the / Morning has been blackening. "Daddy"
If I've killed one man, I've killed two/
The vampire who said he was you/ (ted hughes)
Who drank my blood for a seven years,/ if you want to know/ Daddy you can lie back now./
There's a stake in your fat black heart/ And the villagers never liked you/They are dancing and stamping on you/They always knew it was you/ daddy, you bastard,/ I'm through. Sylvia Plath is somebody we want to know better, this is why we read her poetry. Although much of it is dark, the music of her voice still crys out with such precision and brilliance that we listen, we learn, and we continue reading the words she left behind.
"Death & Co."
I do not stir.
The frost makes a flower,
The dew makes a star,
The dead bell,
The dead bell. Someboy's done for.
Rating:
Summary: Remember the better poet.
Review: It's been said by some of Sylvia Plath's harshest critics that her premature death ensured her fame, and this view has caused her to fall somewhat in critical favor, despite her continuing popularity among more casual readers. The fact is that Plath, unlike her former husband Ted Hughes, was a poet of strong, finely wrought emotions, who walked the precarious balance between control and excess with extraordinary skill in poems like "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus". It's not fair, then, that Hughes, whose recent book _Birthday Letters_ is more overrated than the film "Titanic", should be the one to edit her collected poems. Despite his disruption of her original order for the _Ariel_ poems, as well as other omissions, however, the genius behind the individual poems consistently shines through. Sylvia Plath is a great poet, and her legacy will live on after her story, and the explications of her husband, have become mere footnotes to the work itself.
Rating:
Summary: Repitition as a Momentary Stay
Review: Liam Rector in a poetry class taught at Bennnington College said to me to read Plath for the vowels. I did and she is amazing. Sylvia Plath probably gave more to poetics with her vowels sounds than any other poet and her poem Daddy does it best.
I add a poem of mine here in honor of Sylvia Plath:
Repitition as a Momentary Stay
When you told me just do it
after we talked about structure,
my story remained: love, betrayal, despair.
Is this my fate told over
to the groove of vinyl, the turn
of the page, the return in verse?
To feel the surge of another life,
its endocrine bringing me back to
tone that gives mood moving out of my flesh
not from cold air, but tingling like
Braille. Who knew words could enter
the pulse in counterpoint.
Rating:
Summary: Repitition as a Momentary Stay
Review: Liam Rector in a poetry class taught at Bennnington College said to me to read Plath for the vowels. I did and she is amazing. Sylvia Plath probably gave more to poetics with her vowels sounds than any other poet and her poem Daddy does it best. I add a poem of mine here in honor of Sylvia Plath: Repitition as a Momentary Stay When you told me just do it
after we talked about structure, my story remained: love, betrayal, revenge.
Is this my fate told over to the groove of vinyl, the turn
of the page, the return in verse? To feel the surge of another life,
its endocrine bringing me back to tone that gives mood moving out of my flesh
not from cold air, but tingling like Braille. Who knew vowels could enter
the pulse in counterpoint.
Rating:
Summary: Portrait of an Artist
Review: Perhaps one of the best collections of poetry ever assembled, Sylvia Plath's poems are a must read for Plath fans and poetry buffs alike. Listed in chronological order (as much as possible), readers should pay particular attention to the poems from the summer of 1962 until the last poems in 1963 to fully appreciate the groundbreaking, enigmatic verse that defines Sylvia Plath. In addition to fifty poems written during her years as an undergrad at Smith College, there is a very interesting selection of notes including the original order of poems in Plath's Ariel collection (the order of the posthumous collection was altered following her death). A wonderful gift for (literate) college students (and not just English majors).
Rating:
Summary: "I am not cruel, only truthful-"
Review: Sylvia Plath was a woman with a whole lot of emotions and masks. Sometimes labeled as feminist, a victim, a martyr and a suicide... whether she was or was not these things, she forged a compelling new voice in the l960s America. (She did commit suicide in 1963.) She was perhaps ahead of her time. She is one of the most read American female poets of the 20th century and one of the most talented, as well. Her poems are the window to her soul, an extension of her life. (Some have labeled her as a "Confessional Poet", along with Anne Sexton and Adrienne Rich.) As great poets do, she has left us with a legacy of poems such as Lady Lazarus, Daddy and Mirror. THE COLLECTED PLEMS OF SYLVIA PLATH is a collection of poems by Plath written between the years of 1956-1963. Also included are 50 early poems written by Plath, titled Juvenilia. With an introduction by her then husband Ted Hughes, who gives us some insights as to who Sylvia Plath was as a woman, poet, mother, and wife. (There are also notes on the poems at the end, written by Hughes.) Plath's sometimes sad and painful poems tell us, what kind of person she was. Her flaws show us that she was indeed human and that her stark honesty touches me even more. Her struggle with her inner demons is often what characterizes her poems. The glimpse of her soul that we get through her poems, though it may have come from somewhere dark, is brutally beautiful.
Rating:
Summary: We have come so far, it is over.
Review: Sylvia Plath's life has passed into legend and probably overshadowed the work of an amazing and important poet. That she never achieved the success and critical acceptance she craved during her lifetime was perhaps inevitable, and ultimately what drove her to produce an incredible glut of poems just before she died. These Ariel poems are what made Plath's name, and they are fantastic. Her use of language is brutal, stark, desperate and desperately moving - like no one else before her. The cadences of her poems, regardless of whether or not you understand the words, are remarkably powerful and capture what she must have been feeling - the bruising, paralysing anger mingled with the corrosive bitterness of betrayal and the knowledge that vain hope in the face of despair may not be enough to live on. Read the poems and marvel at their beauty and their humanity.
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