Crossing the Water (Hardcover)

by Sylvia Plath (Author) "The horizons ring me like faggots, Tilted and disparate, and always unstable..." (more)

Editorial Reviews

Review
Sylvia Plath's suicide was like no other American poet's. Hart Crane's dissolution at the bottom of the Caribbean suited one who was in love with the sea, but the poems themselves, emblematic of a poet who wanted to incarnate the American myth, did not directly point to that end. All of Sylvia Plath's work, we can now see, was a prologue to disaster, to "last words," phrases "born all of a piece. . . poems possessed. . . as by the rhythms of their own breathing." She, more than any other modern figure, consciously sought her own annihilation, to leave a world of "Hiroshima ash" and that "country far away as health," to say goodbye to the awfulness of fact and the possibility of things getting better, to make the leap where the knife would "not carve, but enter/ Pure and clean as the cry of a baby,/ And the universe slide from my side." That is why there is such a single-minded purity in her tone and images, living speech which transcends the familiar anguish of the neurotic to take on the blaze and exhilarating candor of one who totally accepts her fate; who, touching rock bottom, rises like the phoenix. Wife, mother, poet, all that she was, none of that can compete with her cold, fierce destiny, a world where "the mirrors are sheeted" and "fixed stars/ Govern a life." Crossing the Water, a collection of poems written just prior to those in Ariel, while not as astonishing as Sylvia Plath's last classic volume, is, nevertheless, of immense importance in recording her extraordinary development. One senses on every page a voice coming into its own, the chaos of a lifetime at last getting ready to assume its final, triumphant shape. (Kirkus Reviews) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author
To this day, Sylvia Plath's writings continue to inspire and provoke. Her only published novel, The Bell Jar, remains a classic of American literature, and The Colossus (1960), Ariel (1965), Crossing the Water (1971), Winter Trees (1971), and The Collected Poems (1981) have placed her among this century's essential American poets.

Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932, the first child of Aurelia and Otto Plath. When Sylvia was eight years old, her father died--an event that would haunt her remaining years--and the family moved to the college town of Wellesley. By high school, Plath's talents were firmly established; in fact, her first published poem had appeared when she was eight. In 1950, she entered Smith College, where she excelled academically and continued to write; and in 1951 she won Mademoiselle magazine's fiction contest. Her experiences during the summer of 1953--as a guest editor at Mademoiselle in New York City and in deepening depression back home--provided the basis for The Bell Jar. Near that summer's end, Plath nearly succeeded in killing herself. After therapy and electroshock, however, she resumed her academic and literary endeavors. Plath graduated from Smith in 1955 and, as a Fulbright Scholar, entered Newnham College, in Cambridge, England, where she met the British poet, Ted Hughes. They were married a year later. After a two-year tenure on the Smith College faculty and a brief stint in Boston, Plath and Hughes returned to England, where their two children were born.

Plath had been successful in placing poems in several prestigious magazines, but suffered repeated rejection in her attempts to place a first book. The Colossus appeared in England, however, in the fall of 1960, and the publisher, William Heinemann, also bought her first novel. By June 1962, she had begun the poems that eventually appeared in Ariel. Later that year, separated from Hughes, Plath immersed herself in caring for her children, completing The Bell Jar, and writing poems at a breathtaking pace.

A few days before Christmas 1962, she moved with the children to a London flat. By the time The Bell Jar was published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, in early 1963, she was in desperate circumstances. Her marriage was over, she and her children were ill, and the winter was the coldest in a century. Early on the morning of February 11, Plath turned on the cooking gas and killed herself.

Plath was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1982 for her Collected Poems.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Borgo Press (June 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0809590581
• ISBN-13: 978-0809590582
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #8,047,447 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

38 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Truly transitional poems, June 16, 2000

By	Joshua Krist (San Francisco, Calif.) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Crossing the Water (Paperback)

This is probably my favorite collection of Plath poetry, although some of my favorite poems aren't in here (Morning Song is my very favorite). From the time I looked at the cover (dark waves at night, what could be better for the writer who crossed the Atlantic to die by her own hand?) to the last poem in the book, I felt that I was seeing Plath's vision at its most clearly expressed. You can feel the dark weight of her impending collapse, but her head is still above water, so to speak. I also think that it's the book with the least amount of self-pity; she's strongest as a poet and as a person in this collection. This is not to discount Ariel, which contain some of her best poems, but they're like flashes of lightning in a grey sky of self-pity. In Crossing the Water, on the other hand, we get to see the loneliness of the long distance swimmer, sure and strong, who knows she's heading into danger.