The Collected Poems

Plath, Sylvia; Ted Hughes (editor)

ISBN 10: 0060909005 / ISBN 13: 9780060909000

Published by Harper Perennial, 1992

About this Item

Stiff illus. wraps. 38th ptg.: 1999. 351 pp. As issued. Size: 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall.

Seller Inventory # 061966

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Collected Poems
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication Date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060909005
• ISBN 13: 9780060909000
• Binding: Soft cover
• Edition: 1st Edition.
• Condition: New
• Book Type: Book
• Seller catalogs:
  • Poetry

About this title

Synopsis

Containing everything that celebrated poet Sylvia Plath wrote after 1956, this is one of the most comprehensive collections of her work. Edited, annotated, and with an introduction by Ted Hughes.

Review

Sylvia Plath died in 1963, and even now her outsize persona threatens to bury her poetry--the numerous biographies and studies often drawing the reader toward anecdote and away from the work. It's a relief to turn to the poems themselves and once more be jolted by their strange beauty, hard-wrought originality and acetylene anger. "It is a heart, / This holocaust I walk in, / O golden child the world will kill and eat." While the juvenilia and poems written before 1960 that Ted Hughes has included here prefigure Plath's later obsessions, they also enable us to witness her turn from thesaurus-heavy verse to stripped-down art as they gather power through raw simplicity. "The blood jet is poetry. / There is no stopping it," she declares in "Kindness."