User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
Inspired by Paul Legault's brilliant idea of translating Emily Dickinson's poems into English, I thought immediately -
I have to steal that idea. So here are some of the Ariel poems of Sylvia Plath translated into English. I have, of course, tried my utmost to perform this task with tact, discretion and good taste.
ARIEL TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH
ELM.
Look, let's get this straight. I am a tree, you are a woman. We can never be together, not in the way you'd like, anyway. Plus, you're kind of irritating.
THE RABBIT CATCHER
I went out with this guy once and then I found out he liked to catch rabbits. So he was toast. I should have dimed the bastard.
BERCK-PLAGE
I went on holiday. Every single person in the whole hotel was talking about me behind my back. I don't like bikinis. Don't even get me started on nude beaches.
THE OTHER
I have something dead in my handbag. Tee hee. Also, I scratched myself and made myself bleed. I don't really recommend marriage.
A BIRTHDAY PRESENT
I got a present. But I was thinking that if I unwrapped it, it would bite my face off. So I didn't. Hah.
THE BEE MEETING
I thought I'd like to join in village life and get involved with local societies and all that. So I went to the bee keepers' meeting. It was like something out of Alfred Hitchcock. I liked it.
STINGS
Now I'm a real bee keeper. I get blase about stings. It's like a metaphor.
THE SWARM
Bees are kind of like Nazis. Or the French. I can't decide.
WINTERING
Country life can suck. I wish I was a bee. No, I don't really. That would be silly. I think it would be silly. Maybe it wouldn't be silly.
A SECRET
Men are like big babies that drink beer and want you to wear high class lingerie. Okay, that's not much of a secret.
THE APPLICANT
I got this job as a temp. So I was filing and I knew I could destroy them if I chose, just like that, but I didn't choose to that day.
DADDY
When I was little and my dad used to dress up in his SS uniform I used to think he looked so smart and handsome. Of course, later, the penny dropped.
LESBOS
You really shouldn't have taken the kittens and given them to the neighbours without a by-your-leave. I think I am going to pour sulphuric acid on your head while you are sleeping. I'll do it tonight. Yes.
FEVER 103
I got one of those 48 hour bugs. That's why he's still alive. If I had any strength in my limbs I would have sulphuric-acided his head last night.
CUT
I nearly cut my fucking thumb off when I was making a casserole for a man. I jumped about swearing. I could have cut off something useful, like his member, but no, it had to be my thumb.
POPPIES IN OCTOBER
Have you noticed that everything is slowly dying of carbon-monoxide poisoning?
LADY LAZARUS
I like to commit suicide like some people like to visit their grandparents. You really don't want to, it's kind of a drag and there's nothing to do there, but you just feel you have to because you're a good person.
LETTER IN NOVEMBER
Dear Ted - Fuck you - Sylvia
DEATH & CO
Cheer up, things could be worse, I could be dead. Oh no, wait a minute - this is worse, that would be better. Hmm.
SHEEP IN FOG
Well, you know sheep aren't that bright to begin with. So when you mix 'em up with a thick fog, the results are hilarious.
Rating: really liked it
Ariel, Sylvia PlathSylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist, and short-story writer.
She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for two of her published collections The Colossus and Other Poems and Ariel, as well as The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her death.
In 1981 The Collected Poems were published, including many previously unpublished works.
Ariel was the second book of Sylvia Plath's poetry to be published. It was originally published in 1965, two years after her death by suicide.
The poems in the 1965 edition of Ariel, with their free flowing images and characteristically menacing psychic landscapes, marked a dramatic turn from Plath's earlier Colossus poems.
Contents (1965 version):
Morning Song,
The Couriers,
Sheep in Fog,
The Applicant,
Lady Lazarus,
Tulips.
Cut,
Elm,
The Night Dances,
Poppies in October,
Berck-Plage,
Ariel,
Death & Co.,
Lesbos,
Nick and the Candlestick,
Gulliver,
Getting There,
Medusa,
The Moon and the Yew Tree,
A Birthday Present,
Mary's Song,
Letter in November,
The Rival,
Daddy,
You're,
Fever 103°,
The Bee Meeting,
The Arrival of the Bee Box,
Stings,
The Swarm,
Wintering,
The Hanging Man,
Little Fugue,
Years,
The Munich Mannequins,
Totem,
Paralytic,
Balloons,
Poppies in July,
Kindness,
Contusion,
Edge,
and Words.
تاریخ نخستین خوانش: در ماه جولای سال 2000میلادی
عنوان: آریل؛ شاعر: سیلویا پلات؛ مترجم: کاوه بهزادی؛ موضوع مجموعه شعر از شاعران ایالات متحده آمریکا - سده 20م
سیلویا پلات، شاعریست که نیاز به معرفی ندارند؛ همانگونه که میدانید به سال 1932میلادی، در ایالت «ماساچوست ِ آمریکا» به دنیا آمدند، و در سال 1963میلادی، در جوانی و اوج، دستان خویش از این جهان شستند؛ از ایشان، کتابهای ِ «آریل»؛ «کتاب ِ بستر»؛ «کلوسوس» «چند شعر ِ دیگر»؛ «درختان ِ زمستانی»؛ «گذر از آب» و…؛ و نیز یک رمان با عنوان: «حباب ِ شیشه» بر جای مانده است
یک هدیه برای تولد
چه چیز است در پس ِ این حجاب؟
آیا زشت است؟ آیا زیباست؟
سوسو میزند
روشن و خاموش میشود
آیا سینه دارد؟ آیا کنار دارد؟
یقین دارم که بی همتاست
یقین دارم همان چیزیست که میخواهم
وقتی که خاموشم در پخت و پز
احساس میکنم نگاه میکند
احساس میکنم فکر میکند
آیا همان چیزیست که مرا بیش از اندازه آماده کرده؟
آیا همان برگزیده است با چشم-حفره های سیاه
که جای زخم بر آن مانده؟
اندازه میگیرد انبوه ِ آرد را و تکه میکند اضافه اش را
در حال ِ چسبیدن به دستورات
دستورات
دستورات
آیا همان است که مسیح را در مریم بشارت داد؟
خدای ِ من، چه مسخره!؛
اما سوسو میزند
روشن و خاموش میشود
صبر نمیکند
و فکر میکنم که مرا میخواهد
چه فرق میکند؟
استخوان باشد یا دکمه ای از مروارید!؛
به هر حال من امسال چیز زیادی از یک هدیه نمیخواهم
چرا که فکر میکنم به تصادفی زنده ام
چرا که شادمان، خودم را به هر طریق ِ ممکن کشته بودم
حالا این حجابها هستند که مانند ِ پرده سوسو میزنند
روشناییهای اطلسی ِ یک پنجره ی زمستانی
سپید، مثل تختخواب ِ کودکان
و برق از نفّس ِ مرده به رنگ دندان ِ فیل
باید یک دندان ِ تیز آنجا باشد,ستونی از اشباح!؛
نمیتوانید ببینید؟ برایم مهم نیست که چیست
آیا تو میتوانی آنرا به من ندهی؟!؛
خجل نباش، مهم نیست اگر کوچک باشد
بخیل نباش، من برای ِ عظمت آماده ام
بگذارید بنشینیم؛
هر یک در سمتی از آن
در شگفت از نورانی بودنش، در شگفت از آینه وار بودنش
بگذارید آخرین شاممان را بر آن بخوریم
آنچنان که بر یک بشقاب در بیمارستان
میدانم که چرا به من نمیدهیش؟
تو وحشت کرده ای
حالا که جهان از جیغی بالا میرود به همراه سرت بی آنکه پروایی داشته باشی
به شکل ِ یک سپر ِ باستانی
اعجازی برای ِ نوادگان ِ شما
اما نترسید، این چنین نیست
من تنها میگیرمش و به کناری میگریزم
و تو نه صدای ِ باز کردنش
نه صدای ِ گسستن ِ زبانش
و نه صدای ِ جیغی در انتها خواهی شنید
فکر نمیکنم امتیازی به این احتیاطم بدهی
آه اگر میدانستی چگونه این حجابها روزهای مرا میکشند
در نگاه ِ تو آنها خود وضوح و شفافیتند، به شکل ِ هوایی تمیز
اما خدای من! ابرها این روزها به سان ِ پنبه شده اند
ارتشی از آنها…………..ارتشی از مونوکسید ِ کربن
به شیرینی، مانند ِ شکر به درون نفس میکشم
و رگهایم را از میلیونها پنهانی پر میکنم
غبارهای ِ غریبی که بر سالهای ِ عمرم خط میکشند
تو لباسهای نقره ایَت را برای این مناسبت بپوش
آیا برایتان غیرممکن است چیزی را رها کنید برود؟
آیا باید به هر چیزی مُهری ارغوانی بزنید؟
آیا باید هر چه را که توانید بکُشید؟
آه، من امروز چیزی میخواهم و تو تنها کسی هستی که میتوانی آنرا به من دهی
چیزی که پس پنجره ام ایستاده است، به عظمت ِ آسمان
چیزی که میان ِ اوراقم نَفَس میکشد
آن مرکز ِ مرده را میگویم
آنجا که زندگیهای ِ شکاف خورده سرد و سخت به تاریخ گره میخورند
نگذار با نامه بیاید، از انگشتی به انگشت ِ دیگر
نگذار با کلمه ای از دهان برسد
آه، من باید شصت ساله باشم
تا زمانی که این همه تحویل داده شود
تا خالی از هر احساسی شوم
تا از آن استفاده کنم
تنها بگذار از این نقاب پایین بیایم
از این حجاب، حجاب، حجاب
اگر این مرگ میبود
من سنگینی ِ عمیقش را و چشمان ِ بی انتهایش را تحسین میکردم
آنوقت میدانستم تو جدی بودی
سپس میتوانست اصالتی
سپس میتوانست تولدی در کار باشد
و چاقو، نه برای ِ تکه کردن، که برای ِ درون شدن میبود
ژاو و پاکیزه، به شکل ِ گریه ی یک کودک
و جهان از کنار ِ من سرازیر میشد.؛
آینهنقره ام، دقیقم، بی هیچ نقش پیشین
هرچه میبینم بی درنگ میبلعم
همانگونه که هست، نیالوده به عشق یا نفرت
بی رحم نیستم، فقط راستگو هستم
چشمان خدایی کوچک، چهار گوشه
اغلب به دیوار رو به رو میاندیشم
صورتی ست و لکه دار
آنقدر به آن نگاه کرده ام که فکر میکنم
پاره ی دل من است
ولی پیدا و ناپیدا میشود
صورتها و تاریکی بارها ما را از هم جدا میکنند
حالا دریاچه ام
زنی روبرویم خم شده است
برای شناختن خود سرا پای مرا میکاود
آنگاه به شمعها یا ماه، این دروغگویان، باز میگردد
پشت او را میبینم و همانگونه که هست منعکس میکنم
زن با اشک و تکان دادن دست پاداشم میدهد
برای او اهمیت دارم، میآید و میرود
این صورت اوست که هر صبح جانشین تاریکی میشود
در من دختری را غرق کرده است
و در من زنی سالخورده هر روز به جستجوی او
مثل ماهی هولناکی برمیخیزد
در پیشگفتار «آریل» اثر: «سیلویا پلات»، که دو سال پیش از خودکشی شاعر، در «لندن» چاپ شد، «رابرت لاول» شاعر «آمریکایی» نگاشته ائد: «در این اشعار، پلات با خودش یکی میشود، خویشتنی که با طراوت، ظرافت و شقاوت آفریده شد»؛ یکی از آن قهرمان اَبَرواقعی و سحرآمیزِ بزرگ کلاسیک؛ «لاول» راست میگویند که «پلات» در شعرهای آخرش با خود یکی میشود؛ بویژه در اشعار دفاتر «گذر از آب» و «آریل» که خودی یکدست، اما مشترک را به وجود میآورد؛ در این مجموعه به ویژه در دفتر اخیر، تجربه های روزمره را با اکسیر اسطوره به احساس و اشتراک عام مبدل میکند؛
تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 24/09/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 19/07/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی
Rating: really liked it
When I was a kid, I loved stories about intrepid explorers who visited places no one had ever seen before, and died heroically in the attempt. I guess Scott of the Antarctic is the canonical example - though later on, I discovered to my surprise that Norwegians just think he was an idiot who didn't prepare carefully, and that Amundsen was the real hero. There is a wonderful episode in Jan Kjærstad's
Erobreren which contrasts the English and Norwegian views of these two great men.
So what's this got to do with
Ariel? I was trying to figure out why I like it so much (it's been one of my absolute favorite pieces of poetry since I first came across it as a teenager), and it struck me that maybe I admired it for similar reasons. Sylvia Plath went on an expedition to a sort of emotional Antarctica, a place most people have heard of but never visited, where you experience love so intensely that it ends up killing you. Before that happened, however, she managed to send back detailed reports of what she'd found there. Perhaps another reason why I associate her and the brave Captain Scott is that she died during the English winter of 1963. I was five at the time, and some of my first memories are of the bitter cold, and of how incredibly deep the snow was. I remember that we were snowed in, and that my father shovelled a path to the house next door, so that we could at least visit them. The snow was much higher than his head. A few hundred miles away, Sylvia had left her husband, and was living in London with her two children. She killed herself on February 11.
Here are some of the passages from
Ariel that I think of most often. I have always assumed that the title poem is about having sex with Ted Hughes, though I found out recently that it's also about her horse. It ends like this:
...White
Godiva, I unpeel -
Dead hands, dead stringencies.
And now I
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.
The child's cry
Melts in the wall.
And I
Am the arrow,
The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red
Eye, the cauldron of morning.
The beginning of
Elm is another of my favourite passages, which expresses better than anything else I can think of just how painful love can be. I remember once showing it to a friend who's had a rather difficult life (we'd been having some discussion about poetry). She seemed almost physically affected; I remember she turned pale, and couldn't finish reading it. I wished I'd had more sense:
I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.
Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?
Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.
All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,
Echoing, echoing...
And I love the end of
Nick and the Candlestick, which she apparently wrote to her son, two years old at the time:
O embryo
Remembering, even in sleep,
Your crossed position.
The blood blooms clean
In you, ruby.
The pain
You wake to is not yours.
Love, love,
I have hung our cave with roses,
With soft rugs--
The last of Victoriana.
Let the stars
Plummet to their dark address,
Let the mercuric
Atoms that cripple drip
Into the terrible well,
You are the one
Solid the spaces lean on, envious.
You are the baby in the barn.
I was so shocked when I read earlier this year that he had also killed himself. But when someone's written a poem like this about you, you're as immortal as the unnamed subject of Shakespeare's Sonnet XVIII.
By the way, most people have been very dismissive of the movie with Gwynneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig. I seem to be one of the rare exceptions; the script was nothing special, but I thought Paltrow had done a fine job of capturing her personality on screen.
Rating: really liked it
Haunting and honest - a scalpel that cuts so deep and quick you don't even feel it. The first time I read Ariel I was amazed by the depth and honesty of the poems; there is no 'slight of hand' here - only the raw and honest feelings of an artist dealing with life and the cumulative toll life takes on us all. Will be one of the few books I continue to read through my life.
Rating: really liked it
Either disturbed by some haunting, otherworldly presence or simply because of the purring birdsong I awake on the early hours of this winter morning and I grab Sylvia Plath’s collection of poems
Ariel, which is calling to me from my bedside table. Still drowsy with soft shades of silky sheets printed on my cheeks my glassy eyes try to focus on stray words that chop like sharpened axes. Streams of unleashed running waters wash over me but fail to cleanse my soul. I am unsettled. Disturbing images flood the still pond of my mind, I feel faint visualizing drops of blood soaking weaved carpets of fluffy snowflakes drawing impossibly flowery forms on shimmering innocence, red tulips opening their moist petals aroused by treacherous dew at dawn, warmth bitterly frozen in morbid colors.
Sylvia’s brushstrokes combine the diluted shades of Manet with the impressionist aggressiveness and stunning tones of Pollock. Vulnerability and firm willpower are both present in form and content in this collection of poems. I encounter unapologetic Sylvia in her
Lady Lazarus bewitching me with her defiant assertion:
Dying
Is an art,
like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.”And I force myself not to think of her tragic suicide and her mental condition when she wrote these verses. I choose to concentrate on the writer, on the genius, on the creativity which enables suffering to become universal works of art that offer comfort and redemption, on the flowing current of feeling rather than on the scabrous speculations hiding behind Sylvia’s supposed products of madness. Truth is I don’t want to know. Some things are best left unsought, some things need to be sensed rather than known, so I decide to surrender to Sylvia’s acidic voice and let the walls of this cage dissolve away and for the briefest of moments, I taste the undistinguishable flavor of exhilarating freedom.
Let the poems speak for themselves. They probe unfalteringly with sardonic disdain, they delve deep in scavenger spirit, pecking unmercifully at their own creator’s flesh, they are abrupt, sarcastic, even deceitful. Sylvia’s virulent words become everlasting vessels, carriers of existential vision, ships of meaning that will perpetually sail the wintry dark waters of countless readers breaking through their foggy minds and dormant hearts.
I thirstily swallow these 43 naked poems trying not to choke on their rawness and I unexpectedly find myself dragged by the powerful force of this kaleidoscopic river of white pure waters, red sensual nooks and black nihilist crannies. I am lost in this world of barren landscapes and atrocious celestial bodies, of endless inner wars and abandoned children and abused fathers. But I don’t want to be found.
“O God, I am not like you
In your vacuous black,
Stars stuck all over, bright stupid confetti.
Eternity bores me,
I never wanted it.”YearsSylvia’s use of colloquial language and her disdainful tone puncture the balloon of comfort and challenge the reader, her assonant and imperfect rhymes structured in free verse blend with myth and natural imagery creating a surreal and hypnotic hum that soothes and strikes back like a cobra, drawing honest blood and recognition.
“Who do you think you are?
A Communion wafer? Blubbery Mary?
I shall take no bite of your body,
Bottle in which I live,
Ghastly Vatican.
I am sick to death of hot salt.
Green as eunuchs, your wishes
Hiss at my sins.
Off, off, eely tentacle!
There is nothing between us.” MedusaSylvia’s choice of words and expressions pungently resonate in this age of gender conflict, broken families and economic inequalities, the bottled rage that derives from continuous betrayal and disappointment can be softened through Plath’s bitter yet courageous individuality.
Some exotic birds aren’t meant to be caged. It would be a sin not to allow their colorful feathers to be spread and fly away. Sylvia escaped from a colorless world to soar the skies of eternity, tingeing them with burning bright celestial pathways that enlighten the firmament of those who, from time to time, dare to look up to the floors of heaven and allow themselves to be consumed by the flames of blazing and immortal art.
“ It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.
It is the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?
Love is a shadow.”Elm
Rating: really liked it
you may only address me as sylvia plath’s personal whore as of now
Rating: really liked it
rip sylvia plath i know you would've loved phoebe bridgers
Rating: really liked it
What do I think? I honestly don't know. My favorite poems were Elm, The Moon and the Yew Tree, and Edge. I admit that Sylvia Plath's poetry may be beyond my ability to fullly understand. I have The Collected Poems, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1982, on my to-read shelf. Maybe the more I read the better I will understand. There is an aura about Sylvia Plath that I find fascinating. Her writing is so unique, so different from anything else, you can't help being drawn to it, like a moth to a flame.
Rating: really liked it
I'm wanting to get into more poetry, but I have to classify books of poetry in two categories: poems I understood, and poems I didn't. The majority of these poems went over my head.
I saw in a previous review that Plath writes very personally, which I suppose is what went wrong here. There were so many abstract references and just being plain honest, 80% of these poems I just had no clue what she was trying to communicate, other than the fact that she wanted to die.
Although I didn't grasp most of the poems in this collection, I did really enjoy a few: Sheep in the Fog, Lady Lazarus, Tulips, and The Rival.
I was a much bigger fan of The Bell Jar than I am her poetry.
Rating: really liked it
Stunned.
Destroyed.
Took the wind out of my sails,
and the light out of my eyes.
Not wanting to curse but fuck me! could she write!
As for "Daddy" what heart crushing despair.
Rating: really liked it
“Cold glass, how you insert yourself
Between myself and myself.
I scratch like a cat.”
These poems are jagged, visceral, and very, very raw. They’re angry and bruised,
“extravagant, like torture.” And they are frequently charged with a dark, mirthless laughter. After all, “there is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.” Or so Camus once said.
As a total poetry novice, I might be way off base with some of my impressions—I didn’t even come close to understanding everything I read. But I
do know that she shared some of her deepest, most intense feelings with me. She made me absorb them. She forced me to feel them too. Plath’s depression had claws.
“There is the sunlight, playing its blades,
Bored hoodlum in a red room.”
You know, her own dangerous radiance felt somehow similar...
Rating: really liked it
I picked this up last night, wanting to read just one poem, The Moon and the Yew Tree specifically, but I ended up reading all of them, the entire book. I won't pretend to understand what most of her poems were about, but they left me in goosebumps and ashiver. I enjoyed them.
What a mind, what a mind. Utterly glorious. Bane of her existence and yet because of its blackness, she still exists today.
Sublime work.
I wish she had written more novels too. Her poetic prose and timings are undeniable.
Read it.
Addendum: as I was reading this it dawned on me her poems are undeniably Gothic, weird this didn't occur to me before.
Her every poem makes me suck in my breath. It is hardly breaking news that she was a good poet but such terrific words, I don't even want to imagine the insides of her terrible terrible mind.
Rating: really liked it
So, no-one needs
another review of Plath's raging, bitter, vengeful poems that batter us with image after startling, shattering image: the scarlet bloom of blood, claustrophobia and airlessness, the dissolution of the female body and voice, balanced by transcendental moments of renewal and rebirth.
But it's worth saying that this edition is based on the 1965 version 'edited' by Ted Hughes which took out poems which he considered too aggressive (presumably towards him?), and which reordered the poems from Plath's manuscript. (Collected Poems gives Plath's own order on p.295.)
Leaving aside all the well-rehearsed arguments about his appropriations and muting of her voice, the effect of Hughes' possibly self-interested reordering and re-selection means that 'his' Ariel ends on a note of annihilation, the 'her dead body' of 'Edge', the penultimate poem, and 'words dry and riderless' of the final 'Words'. It makes Plath's suicide teleological.
Her own selection and ordering was, arguably, less bleak - she ends with the Bee poems ('The Bee Meeting', 'The Arrival of the Bee Box', 'Stings', 'The Swarm' which Hughes excluded altogether and 'Wintering') and the final lines of her edition speak to at least the hope of some kind of renewal:
Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas
Succeed in banking their fires
To enter another year?
What will they taste of, the Christmas roses?
The bees are flying. They taste the spring.
Rating: really liked it
A collection released two years after her death, written in a grand burst of creativity just before death... I had to get this mainly because of the cover, but I can say that though I have the 'all poems' book, having this separately was worth it.
...
And I a smiling woman
I am only thirty.
And like that cat I have nine times to die...
(from "Lady Lazarus")
There are so many themes I could get from here: colors (red, white, black, etc.), moods (uncertainty, calm, quiet joy, being distant), and subjects (motherhood, marriage expectations, mornings, the "still alive" after another suicide attempt, feverishness, something that reads like a nightmare, death-waiting, a solitary autumn walk, children with balloons...), and nature (bees, flowers, moon, night, sheep, trees..)
Some poems were difficult to open, difficult to find their meaning, but that just means repeated readings might open them.
But the best poem here is the very intense RAEG of "Daddy", that feels like your head knocking against some sudden hard surface, the language dancing on repeat around certain words, finally ending in what feeling like a shout mixed with rage-and-triumphant-joy - it is a jumping point with an exclamation mark!
(There's even a small echo of it in "Little Fugue", I feel.)
This does have a slight feel of 'last collection ever', even if not so intended. But it feels honest, and like her. I don't see myself wanting to interpret each poem here (though the themes above might be a little), but the moods seem so clear even in the poems I can't open yet. This is a quick read, yet at the same time not, since I feel rereads are ahead. Yet for a last collection, it feel like a perfect collection.
Rating: really liked it
It probably won't be right to draw comparisons between the Sylvia Plath who wrote
Mad Girl's Love Song during her time at Smith's and the Sylvia Plath of
Ariel. There's a world of difference between a Sylvia merely mourning lost love and a bitter, lonesome, vengeful, depressed Sylvia trying to live out the last vestiges of a tumultuous life by seeking a form of catharsis through these poems. And, indeed, a very personal set of poems these are.
It took me a while to get through this book not only because you cannot breeze through poetry as if it were a piece of fiction. But because my obsession with
Daddy, Lady Lazarus and
The Applicant got in the way of my progress with the remaining poems.
I think I have read the 3 at least 20 times each since the day I picked up Ariel.
Merely trying to imagine the ways, in which this lady could have further overwhelmed the literary world had she lived a full life, gives me goosebumps.
Who would have thought that cutting your thumb on a chopping board could transform into exquisite poetry?
A million stars.
