The Colossus and Other Poems
by Sylvia Plath

List Price: $14.00
Our Price: $7.43
You Save: $6.57 (47%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $6.00 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions

Book Summary Information

Book Reviews of The Colossus and Other Poems

Book Review: Achieving Harmony through Conflict: Plath's Word-Sculptures
Summary: 4 Stars

In "Hardcastle Crags," we have an analogue for a woman's heels against the pavement: "Flintlike, her feet struck / Such a racket of echoes." We have the slovenly slush of the tide at Point Shirley, where the poet's grandmother "kept house / Against what the sluttish, rutted sea could do." We have in other slant-rhymed terza-rima, and intricate stanza shapes reminiscent of Richard Wilbur and his lyric called "Beasts."

And has anyone captured the somnolent wakefulness of "the chilly no-man's-land of five o'clock in the morning" better than Sylvia Plath in "The Ghost's Leavetaking"?

There are poems about mushrooms, moles, and men in black. There is a homage to the artist Leonard Baskin, renowned as a maker of woodcuts. A keen visual sense in these poems leads us not to be surprised when we learn that Plath worked well as a painter of watercolours.

Her second pre-posthumous volume, "Ariel," is perhaps more famous for its unselfsparing chronicle of a crashing marriage and of suicidal depression. Its fiercely unfettered cadences and controversial images attracted immediate attention, praise and opprobrium. But this reviewer feels that the poems of "Colossus" represent the superior achievement, possessing a technique and a sonic command surpassed by precious few poets of our age.

Poetry Books

• Books > Subjects > Literature & Fiction
• United States > Poetry