Not the Little Mermaid, please...don't do that. | Ariel

Totally Awesome a must have | Ariel | Sylvia Plath

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	• Ariel Sylvia Plath Hiperion, 1997 average customer review:based on 51 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Plath and motherhood

It seems every morbid well read teenage girl would carry a Sylvia Plath book around school, and I was one of them (I can't speak for the current Extreme Makeover, American Idol, online porn generation) Although I struck the Plath pose in high school, in all honesty I didn't really understand and appreciate her until my late thirties after I was married and had children. As a stay at home mother I know all too well the feeling of inadaquacy I must endure from those that deem me unworthy of anything too serious or intellectual. When I read Ariel and The Bell Jar years later it was more poignant. As a 39 year old mother of a small child I now understand what chauvanism and gender condecension really is, and it has allowed to read Plath with more empathy.

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Not the Little Mermaid, please...don't do that.

This is the much heralded Plath collection that everyone should read if you're into poetry, Plath, or heck, even good work. At a time of internal angst and turmoil, Mrs. Hughes cranked this out in a distinct voice and the greatest poems of her work are here: Lady Lazarus, Daddy, etc etc...It's a genuine treasure of poetry. If you can, get the voice recordings of Sylvia reading her own work. She has a soulful, determined, almost English (huh, wonder WHERE she got that from) intonation that makes you want to kiss her red mouth (that she was known for) and bless her for this beautiful, painful, stubbornly gorgeous poetry. Bravo, Plath!

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Totally Awesome a must have

So dark yet beautiful, a must have for every women. I was left speechless with it's intensity and shocked by the passion.
I ordered Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters, at the same time and read it after reading Ariel. Then I started reading them together one of his and then one of hers. I was moved to tears and spent an evening in near exhaustation, I'm left speechless.
Call me silly, but I can't help but see a very tragic modern day Romeo and Juliet with these two books. The expression of pain, hurt and love in these two poets is beyond comparsion and seldom seen. They touched the soul and will be remembered.
Thank you Sylvia and Thank you Ted.

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harrowingly alive, forcefully galloping, life-affirming poems

There are two adjectives commonly applied to this book by people who haven't read it: it is often said to be a "feminist" book, and a "depressing" one. I think these two not-quite-accurate labels arise so frequently because Sylvia Plath is, unfortunately, better-known to the general public for being female and psychologically troubled than for being an accomplished poet.

This is not an agenda-driven book, it is not a book aimed at only a select audience, and it is, above all, not a depressing book. "Ariel" contains poems of awe ("Morning Song"), poems of biting irony ("The Applicant"), and poems of exhilaration so intense that it blurs the line between wanting to live and wanting to die ("Ariel"), but in all of these poems Plath's fighting spirit is evident. The anger, the rage, the *bite* of the poems about her reaction to her husband's adultery seem to me to be the mark of someone who is fighting so hard to reclaim her life because she so desperately wants to live. These are *not* the poems of someone who has turned her face to the wall and resigned herself to defeat. "I am too pure for you or anyone," she asserts (with a defiant head-toss, perhaps) in one poem. In another poem, one that tells of a swarm of bees that kamikaze-attacked a man (to punish him for his "lies," it would seem), she says, "They thought death was worth it, but I/Have a self to recover, a queen." This "queen" of the bees is transparently a symbol for Plath's inner self, which had hitherto been lain dormant beneath the weighty tarps of depression, and it is described in language that is harrowingly alive, evoking metaphors of healing and resurrection: "Now she is flying/More terrible than she ever was, red/Scar in the sky, red comet/Over the engine that killed her--/The mausoleum, the wax house." In short, these are forcefully galloping, life-affirming poems. Just as some people lose their battles against cancer or other diseases, Plath ultimately lost her battle against depression, but these poems suggest that it wasn't for lack of trying. The final poem in this restored edition speaks of how the battle was a close one, whose outcome was still in question up until the very end: "This is the time of hanging on.... Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas/Succeed in banking their fires/To enter another year?/What will they taste of, the Christmas roses?/The bees are flying. They taste the spring."

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A 'Just Right' edition.

I'm not going to review Ariel.
If you've come this far, you've already read the poems, either on-line, or in a paperback edition. There is nothing I could say about one of the greatest poetic works of the 20th century.
I will review this edition, however. It's just right. Not to fancy (Ariel somehow wouldn't work in a gilded leather bound edition), certainly not cheap. It's well bound, well put together, and the original manuscript works are here, in an easy to read format.
It's over twenty bucks, and that's a lot of money for such a small book--but you'll keep it forever.

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Upon the publication of her posthumous volume of poetry, Ariel, in the mid-1960s, Sylvia Plath became a household name. Readers may be surprised to learn that the draft of Ariel left behind by Sylvia Plath when she died in 1963 is different from the volume of poetry eventually published to worldwide acclaim.

This facsimile edition restores, for the first time, the selection and arrangement of the poems as Sylvia Plath left them at the point of her death. In addition to the facsimile pages of Sylvia Plath?s manuscript, this edition also includes in facsimile the complete working drafts of the title poem, "Ariel," in order to offer a sense of Plath's creative process, as well as notes the author made for the BBC about some of the manuscript's poems.

In her insightful foreword to this volume, Frieda Hughes, Sylvia Plath's daughter, explains the reasons for the differences between the previously published edition of Ariel as edited by her father, Ted Hughes, and her mother's original version published here. With this publication, Sylvia Plath's legacy and vision will be re-evaluated in the light of her original working draft.

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