I've given a bit of time to Plath, but she's not my favourite poet. I'm more of a Larkin fan. And, for all his innumerable faults, Hughes.
I decided to pick up her poems because I was stock checking the poetry section at work and realised I'd given away my copy of her poetry and fancied a refresher.
'The night sky is only a sort of carbon paper, Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars Letting in the light, peephole after peephole A bone white light, like death, behind all things.'
Insomniac
How can you not get behind that?
Her work is dark and mythic. There's this constant oppressive atmosphere that is lifted, only to see it replaced by a deepened morbidity.
I think I cracked the reason that young poets fuss over her and write terrible poems in response to her work. The older I get. The more I read it. The more layers come away and the more meaning shines through it. But when I first read her work it's just pretty words. It didn't make any sense to me. Young poets like that. They write work that makes no sense whatsoever and has no deep meaning. They mistake her work for an emotion made into a poem, rather than the poem itself harnessing emotion and amplifying it. So they write about the night being like a shadow, or their hearts being stitched together with words... Nonsense.
When Plath writes, she's tackling the most human and frightening aspects of being alive. Especially being alive with mental health issues. I dig that, because I relate a lot. I've got bipolar, her work speaks to me because it flits between high energy and this crushing malaise.
Plath's work has suffered a lot at the hands of Hughes. It saddens me to admit it, but he was utterly in control of the work we saw. So much was left out of the public eye. I feel like it's hard to rate her work in view of that and so I always preface my reviews with this acknowledgement.
I feel like so much of the work she wrote that dealt with the outside world, and the people in it, aren't available to us. So every collection reads as very interior work and so I find it difficult to engage with because I'm trapped inside myself so much that I enjoy reading work that sets me free.
So, whereas I give this collection a 4, I feel like we'll never really have enough of her really powerful work because it would have damaged Hughes to release it.
If you get a chance, read a few of her poems. They're so beautiful and so easy just to read a few online. Here is a link to some of them...
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Image Background: M.C. Escher
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