Rating: 
Summary: The only thing missing...
Review: Was the lovely juvenalia poem "Mad Girl's Lovesong;" fortunately, you can find it in the back of the paperback version of The Bell Jar. Wonderful poetry. Beautiful, honest, real, and raw. Even if you don't like poetry, you will come to love the work of Sylvia Plath.
Rating:
Summary: Potent Poetry
Review: Whatever affect Ted Hughes had on compiling this collection of Sylvia Plath's poems after her death by suicide, these poems are still absolutely mesmerizing and breathtaking in their power.Plath used language with finely honed instincts, and her poems can indeed cut to the vary marrow, the very quick of our own, human bones, so to speak. "Daddy" is a masterpiece poem, and her signature poem, and it is incomparable in its compression of energy through linguistic structure, and its devastatingly final (and complete) power at the end. But, there are so many other poems in this work that are incredibly powerful, that I won't even try to mention them, here. The collection begins with 50 poems from Plath's youth, and while they are good, and show the promise of Plath as a poet, they are not anywhere near as powerful as Plath's later work. My favorite of these poems from her youth is "Bitter Strawberries." "Snakecharmer" is another favorite of mine from Plath's adult work, coming before her "Ariel" work. As the collection progresses, it gets more and more powerful, culminating in her last work, that appeared in her last collection, "Ariel." This last work is devastatingly powerful, and it will leave any astute reader in a cleansed spiritual state. This is Plath's gift to us, her readers. I highly recommend this book to everybody.
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