My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I enjoyed reading Sylvia Plath’s last works, in the original form that her ex-husband put together after her death. There is another edition that restores the Ariel collection to what the author originally intended in the draft of the work she left at her death. No matter which version you read, you will still be entranced by many of her poems. I particularly liked “Morning Song”, “The Applicant”, “Wintering” and one of her most powerful poems, “Daddy”. I wasn’t totally taken with the “Ariel” poem itself. I liked it but it didn’t hit me inside like the others.

Good poetry, of which Plath’s collection is a strong example, is difficult to read, at least for me. It’s a tight distillation of contemporary thought, culture and understandings, tied together with the inner emotional landscape of the creator. Most novels, including even a few postmodern ones, you can usually pick up, start reading and have some basic understanding of what’s happening at that very moment. Poems, on the other hand, require a great deal of effort, patience and love in order to grasp more than simply a nice execution of form. And when poems are collected, they take on another level of understanding, and one might even say an additional level is added by the order in which the poems are laid out.