Rating: 
Summary: Plath Resurrected!
Review: Sylvia Plath has been resurrected and writes once again through Kate Moses.
She has slid her slender, delicate hand over Moses' as a guide, and erupts upon the pages like ball of fire.The first thing that struck me, was the title. "Wintering" A Novel Of Sylvia Plath...Not A Novel About Sylvia Plath.
Kate Moses is so knowledgable about Plath that she becomes her.
The language is delectable,lush, and as brillant as Plath. And the vocabulary, well let me put it this way, I kept my dictionary near me throughout the reading. Absolutely superb. Moses uses Plath's last book of poetry, Ariel, as her chapters. Daddy, Lesbos, Fever 103, Ariel, and of course, Wintering. She brings the reader into Plath's state of mind, her thoughts, her feelings for Ted, even surprisingly, her happiness. The reader will feel the dead of winter inside their bones, the moisure freezing inside their nostrils, smell Plath's sour breath down the back of their necks, hear the ringing of phones, bells, and the coughing of sick children. "She couldn't wait for the baby bird to die, gasping in it's shoe box with its brave mournful cheeping. Ted taped the box to the bathhose and hooked the gas stove. She was relieved, ashamed at her relief. The birds innocent misery an oppression she was desperate to escape." - WINTERING- Sylvia Plath was not a victim, nor weak. If anything, it is amazing she lasted for as long as she did. I only wish it would have been longer. I shall end this with her own voice... "I simply cannot see where there is to get to." -ARIEL- 1960
Rating: 
Summary: Novel =Fiction
Review: Truman Capote called "In Cold Blood" a nonfiction novel, thus initiating a genre of fiction revisited here by Kate Moses.
Some other reviewers have criticised Moses for not dramatizing her novel by demonizing Hughes and Wevill. Her not doing so elevates her work into an exploration of character, emotion and circumstance.
Plath's life and death, such promise and loss, have been explored and dissected ad infinitum for forty years. Writers have cast Plath, Hughes and their circle as players in a drama for readers to idolize or vilify. For example, Janet Malcolm's "The Silent Woman" is embarrassing in its unwitting revelation of Malcolm's crush on Hughes. Various biographers portay Hughes as a boorish womanizer, Plath as a self-pitying harpy. Where is the truth?
I read "Wintering" after seeing the movie "Sylvia". I was frustrated that the movie failed to connect the viewer to Plath and Hughes, and was all the more enriched by Moses' vivid and wrenching evocation of Plath's disintegrating psyche while using the titles of the poems as referents.
Moses captures the increasing pressure of Plath's doomed and lonely struggle to excel as wife, mother, and artist. Plath as earth mother is contrasted with Assia Wevill's elegant, cool glamour, and the telephone scenes contrasting the bedraggled Plath in a phone booth talking to the smugly venemous Dido Merwin evoke the crushing hopelessness Plath must have felt. It is all the more amazing that Plath, before succumbing to despair, focused her Medean rage and created the "Ariel" poems which are her claim to immortality.
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