Plath: Poems - (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets) by Sylvia Plath (Hardcover)

About the Book

Poetry by Sylvia Plath that deals with nature, human relationships, families, the role of women, courage, and suffering.

Book Synopsis

A beautiful hardcover selection the best-loved poems of Pulitzer Prize-winner Sylvia Plath, author of The Bell Jar. AN EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY POCKET POET.

Sylvia Plath's tragically abbreviated career as a poet began with work that was, in the words of one of her teachers, Robert Lowell, "formidably expert." It ended with a group of poems published after her suicide in 1963 which are, in the nakedness of their confessions, in their black humor, in their ferocious honesty about what people do to one another and to themselves, among the most harrowing lyrics in the English language--poems in which a magnificent, exquisitely disciplined literary gift has been brought to bear upon the unbearable. In these transfiguring poems, Plath managed the rarest of feats: she changed the direction and orientation of an art form.

This Everyman's Library Pocket Poets edition includes:

- "Lady Lazarus"
- "Daddy"
- "Morning Song"
- "Tulips"
- "The Moon and the Yew Tree"
- "Ariel"
- "Poppies in October"
- "Death & Co."

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a jewel-toned jacket.

Review Quotes

"[Her poems] have that exquisite, heart-breaking quality about them that has made Sylvia Plath our acknowledged Queen of Sorrows, the spokeswoman for our most private, most helpless nightmares.... Her poetry is as deathly as it is impeccable; it enchants us almost as powerfully as it must have enchanted her." --Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Times

About the Author

Sylvia Plath was born in 1932 in Massachusetts. She began publishing poems and stories as a teenager and by the time she entered Smith College had won several poetry prizes. She was a Fulbright Scholar in Cambridge, England, and married British poet Ted Hughes in London in 1956. The young couple moved to the States, where Plath became an instructor at Smith College, and had two children. Later, they moved back to England, where Plath continued writing poetry and wrote The Bell Jar, which was first published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas in England in 1963. On February 11, 1963, Plath committed suicide. The Bell Jar was first published under her own name in the United States by Harper & Row in 1971, despite the protests of Plath's family. Plath's Collected Poems, published posthumously in 1981, won the Pulitzer Prize.