The Colossus and Other Poems
by Sylvia Plath
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Book Summary Information
Author: Sylvia PlathEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1998-05-19
ISBN: 0375704469
Number of pages: 96
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of The Colossus and Other Poems
Book Review: Exploring Plath's early work
Summary: 4 Stars
Sylvia Plath is well reputed as a poet. Her untimely death, at too early an age, silenced her poetic voice. This book represents one of her early works.
Her poetry is not beautiful or lyric or elegiac. There is a hardness, almost a clinical coldness, to the verses, and some dark themes recur. And some odds poems based on intriguingly selected facts.
Of the latter. . . . A stone coffin from the 4th century AD in Cambridge (England) contains skeletons of a woman, a mouse, and a shrew. The woman's ankle bone was slightly gnawed. Here are a couple lines from "All the Dead Dears."
". . .
Relics of a mouse and a shrew
That battened for a day on her ankle-bone.
These three, unmasked now, bear
Dry witness
To the gross eating game. . ."
"The Manor Garden"
"The fountains are dry and the roses over.
Incense of death. Your day approaches.
The pears fatten like little buddhas.
A bleu mist is dragging the lake.
. . . .
Two suicides, the family wolves,
Hours of blankness. . . ."
"Frog Autumn"
"Summer grows old, cold-blooded mother.
The insects are scant, skinny.
In these palustral homes we only
Croak and wither."
And, since I grew up on a farm and--for a time--saw many hogs in our hog house, I cannot resist noting this poem--"Sow."
"God knows how our neighbor managed to breed
His great sow:
Whatever his shrewd secret, he kept it hid...
In the same way
He kept the sow--impounded from public stare,
Prize ribbon and pig show."
If you are interested in the earlier works of Plath, this is an obvious work to explore. As one comment says on the back cover of the book: "[Plath] steers clear of feminine charm, deliciousness, gentility, supersensitivity and the act of being a poet. She simply writes good poetry."
Summary of The Colossus and Other Poems
With this startling, exhilarating book of poems, which was first published in 1960, Sylvia Plath burst into literature with spectacular force. In such classics as "The Beekeeper's Daughter," "The Disquieting Muses," "I Want, I Want," and "Full Fathom Five," she writes about sows and skeletons, fathers and suicides, about the noisy imperatives of life and the chilly hunger for death. Graceful in their craftsmanship, wonderfully original in their imagery, and presenting layer after layer of meaning, the forty poems in The Colossus are early artifacts of genius that still possess the power to move, delight, and shock.Plath, Sylvia Books
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