Customer Reviews

The Collected Poems (P.S.)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I thought I owned all the poems she had because I had "Crossing the Water", "The Colossus", and "Ariel". But this book has a large number of unpublished poems, and poems that were published but not selected for those collections. In addition, the footnotes and commentary by her husband Ted Hughes are invaluable and fascinating. A must for Plath scholars and fans.

I was eagerly expecting this book.
The poetry of Plath does not need any more praises, for her name and fame already bring with themselves all the admiration from the critics and the public alike, amassed in time with sustained ardour.
But what did negatively surprised me for a book of collected poems from such a renowned author was the overall quality of the volume's presentation. The paper severely lacks in quality. It's of course darker than the usual good quality paper and it is a bit coarse. I would've probably suggested a laminated book cover, rather than the plain and frail paperback, which can easily get stained (and you couldn't clean it as efficiently as a laminated one), if not a hardback.
My opinion always was that the presentation of a book should at least try to come close to the art of an author's creation. But this certainly isn't the case here. I'm disappointed.
I give with all one's heart 5 stars to the poetry of Sylvia Plath, and also to the introduction and notes, and 1 star to the quality of the book. If it would be possible to Amazon to introduce two kind of item rates: one for the writer's efficacy as a literary craftsman and another one for the book's presentation.

This is work of the highest potency. Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, Toni
Morrison, and even Madonna have all mentioned reading her. As a Salon.com
writer put it, "if we could bottle her verse, it would be the strongest brew
in the bar."

Some of Plath's phrases stand in the lyrical company of Yeats, her imagery
in the company of Rimbaud -- but the mournful obsessiveness, lit with fury,
is hers alone. Her late work is a de Chirico landscape come to life. "The
Moon and the Yew Tree" is like reading a Van Gogh.

Take the journey. Start off casually, flipping through to find the shorter
poems. Then, find yourself addicted until you're reading the dense early
work and the juvenilia, fiending for just one more hit of the imagery and
phrasing that goes off like a firecracker "through the black amnesias of
heaven."

This is the poet who wrote "where spilt lives congeal and stiffen to
history." That's what you're dealing with. Plath is the most Disquieting
Muse.

The only reason I gave this book a 4 instead of a 5 rating was the cheap, Dover Thrift Edition style paper. Surely a titan such as Plath deserves nice, acid-free paper with a more sturdy binding? I suspect that as lovers of poetry we are uniformly captivated by the overall presentation. This cheap edition does not do Plath justice. Really frustrating. Wish she was on Library of America. Blah.

Every poem in this collection is absolutely astounding. This is the book you will read over and over from. I encourage everyone to buy it.

This book everything a SP fanatic could wish for (has ALL of her well known poems as well as some of her lesser known poems- obliviously excluding the poems that have not yet been discovered). Its chronologically organized (her first poems in the beginning and her later/ final poems at the end). I love it. Great book and a nice introduction by Ted Hughes. Definitely recommend if your wish to get SP educated!

I wanted to hone it till I became saintly and thin and essential as the blade of these pages