The Collected Poems
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. &quot;It is a heart, / This holocaust I walk in, / O golden child the world will kill and eat.&quot; 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. &quot;The blood jet is poetry. / There is no stopping it,&quot; she declares in &quot;Kindness.&quot;