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› Find signed collectible books: 'Ariel'
Sylvia Plath churned out her final poems at the remarkable rate of two or three a day, and Robert Lowell describes them as written by "hardly a person at all ... but one of those super-real, hypnotic, great classical heroines." Even more remarkable, she wrote them during one of the coldest, snowiest winters (1962-63) Londoners have ever known. Snowbound, without central heating, she and her two children spent much of their time sniffling, coughing, or running temperatures (In "Fever 103°" she writes, "I have been flickering, off, on, off on. / The sheets grow heavy as a lecher's kiss."). Pipes froze, lights failed, and candles were unobtainable.
As if these physical privations weren't enough, Plath was out in the cold in another sense--her husband, Ted Hughes, had left her for another woman earlier that year. Despite all this (or perhaps because of it), the Ariel poems dazzle with their lyricism, their surprising and vivid imagery, and their wit. Rather than confining herself to her bleak surroundings, Plath draws from a wide array of experience. In "Berck-Plage," for instance, clouds are "electrifyingly-coloured sherbets, scooped from the freeze." In "The Night Dances," the poet stands crib-side, reveling in her son's own brand of do-si-do: "Such pure leaps and spirals--Surely they travel / The world forever, I shall not entirely / Sit emptied of beauties, the gift / Of your small breath..."
Though at times they present the reader with hopelessness laid bare, these poems also teem with the brightest shards of a life, confounding those who merely look for the words of a gloomy, dispassionate suicide. Plath rose each morning in the final months of her life to "that still blue, almost eternal hour before the baby's cry" and left us these words like "axes/After whose stroke the wood rings..." [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Ariel: The Restored Edition, A Facsimile of Plath's Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement'
Sylvia Plath churned out her final poems at the remarkable rate of two or three a day, and Robert Lowell describes them as written by "hardly a person at all ... but one of those super-real, hypnotic, great classical heroines." Even more remarkable, she wrote them during one of the coldest, snowiest winters (1962-63) Londoners have ever known. Snowbound, without central heating, she and her two children spent much of their time sniffling, coughing, or running temperatures (In "Fever 103°" she writes, "I have been flickering, off, on, off on. / The sheets grow heavy as a lecher's kiss."). Pipes froze, lights failed, and candles were unobtainable.
As if these physical privations weren't enough, Plath was out in the cold in another sense--her husband, Ted Hughes, had left her for another woman earlier that year. Despite all this (or perhaps because of it), the Ariel poems dazzle with their lyricism, their surprising and vivid imagery, and their wit. Rather than confining herself to her bleak surroundings, Plath draws from a wide array of experience. In "Berck-Plage," for instance, clouds are "electrifyingly-coloured sherbets, scooped from the freeze." In "The Night Dances," the poet stands crib-side, reveling in her son's own brand of do-si-do: "Such pure leaps and spirals--Surely they travel / The world forever, I shall not entirely / Sit emptied of beauties, the gift / Of your small breath..."
Though at times they present the reader with hopelessness laid bare, these poems also teem with the brightest shards of a life, confounding those who merely look for the words of a gloomy, dispassionate suicide. Plath rose each morning in the final months of her life to "that still blue, almost eternal hour before the baby's cry" and left us these words like "axes/After whose stroke the wood rings..." [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Ariel's Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and the Story of Birthday Letters'
"This erudite critical study...breathes new life into Plath scholarship."Publishers Weekly, starred review
When Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters was published in 1998, it was greeted with astonishment and acclaim, immediately landing on the bestseller list. Few suspected that Hughes had been at work for a quarter of a century on this cycle of poems addressed to his first wife, Sylvia Plath. In Ariel's Gift, Erica Wagner explores the destructive relationship between these two poets through their lives and their writings. She provides a commentary to the poems in Birthday Letters, showing the events that shaped them and, crucially, showing how they draw upon Plath's own work. "Both narratively engaging and scholastically comprehensive."Thomas Lynch, Los Angeles Times "Wagner has set the poems of Hughes's Birthday Letters in the context of his marriage to Plath with great delicacy."Times Literary Supplement 8 pages of b/w photographs [via]More editions of Ariel's Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and the Story of Birthday Letters:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Birthday Letters'
Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters--88 tantalizing responses to Sylvia Plath and the furies she left behind--emerge from an echo chamber of art and memory, rage and representation. In the decades following his wife's 1963 suicide, Hughes kept silent, a stance many have seen as guilty, few as dignified. While an industry grew out of Plath's life and art, and even her afterlife, he continued to compose his own dark, unconfessional verses, and edited her Collected Poems, Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963, and Journals. But Hughes's conservancy (and his sister Olwyn's power as Plath's executrix) laid him open to yet more blame. Biographers and critics found his cuts to her letters self-interested, and decried his destruction of the journals of her final years--undertaken, he insisted, for the sake of their children.
In Birthday Letters we now have Hughes's response to Plath's white-hot mythologizing. Lost happiness intensifies present pain, but so does old despair: "Your ghost," he acknowledges, "inseparable from my shadow." Ranging from accessible short-story-like verses to tightly wound, allusive lyrics, the poems push forward from initial encounters to key moments long after Plath's death. In "Visit," he writes, "I look up--as if to meet your voice / With all its urgent future / that has burst in on me. Then look back / At the book of the printed words. / You are ten years dead. It is only a story. / Your story. My story." These poems are filled with conditionals and might-have-beens, Hughes never letting us forget forces in motion before their seven-year marriage and final separation. When he first sees Plath, she is both scarred (from her earlier suicide attempt) and radiant: "Your eyes / Squeezed in your face, a crush of diamonds, / Incredibly bright, bright as a crush of tears..." But Fate and Plath's father, Otto, will not let them be. In the very next poem, "The Shot," her trajectory is already plotted. Though Hughes is her victim, her real target is her dead father--"the god with the smoking gun."
Of course, "The Shot" and the accusatory "The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother" are an incitement to those who side (as if there is a side!) with Plath. Newsweek has already chalked up the reaction of poet and feminist Robin Morgan to the book: "My teeth began to grind uncontrollably." But Hughes makes it clear that his poems are written for his dead wife and living children, not her acolytes' bloodsport. He has also, of course, written them for himself and the reader. Pieces such as "Epiphany," "The 59th Bear," and "Life After Death" are masterful mixes of memory and image. In "Epiphany," for instance, the young Hughes, walking in London, suddenly spots a man carrying a fox inside his jacket. Offered the cub for a pound, he hesitates, knowing he and Plath couldn't handle the animal--not with a new baby, not in the city. But in an instant, his potent vision extends beyond the animal, perhaps to his and Plath's children:
Already past the kittenishOther poems are more influenced by Plath's "terrible, hypersensitive fingers," including "The Bee God" and "Dreamers," which is apparently a record of Plath's one encounter with Hughes's mistress: "She fascinated you. Her eyes caressed you, / Melted a weeping glitter at you. / Her German the dark undercurrent / In her Kensington jeweller's elocution / Was your ancestral Black Forest whisper--" This exotic woman, "slightly filthy with erotic mystery," seems a close relation to Plath's own Lady Lazarus, and the poem would be equally powerful without any biographical information. This is the one paradoxical pity of this superb collection. These poems require no prior knowledge--but for better or worse, we possess it. [via]
But the eyes still small,
Round, orphaned-looking, woebegone
As if with weeping. Bereft
Of the blue milk, the toys of feather and fur,
The den life's happy dark. And the huge whisper
Of the constellations
Out of which Mother had always returned.
› Find signed collectible books: 'Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath'
"A vivid and, to me, moving portrait of a young woman who, carrying the full mixed cultural load of Americans born in 1932, as well as personal distresses and limitations peculiar to herself, (became) in ten driven years . . . the most ruthlessly original poet of her generation."--John Updike. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Cave Birds: An Alchemical Cave Drama Poems'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Collected Poems'

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Collected Poems of Anne Stevenson 1955-1995'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Crossing the Water'
› Find signed collectible books: 'Crossing the Water: Transitional Poems'
The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Difficulties of a Bridegroom: Stories'
Ted Hughes is Britain's reigning poet laureate, and he confesses that most of his short fiction is merely "an accompaniment to my poems." But there are many gems here, including the affecting trilogy portraying the poet's South Yorkshire childhood. The finest tale in this collection may be "The Wound," actually a radio play about a dying soldier trekking across a pitiless desert. The death-march transforms itself into an allegory of the Buddhist path from death to rebirth. Most of these short stories date from the 1950s and 60s, before Hughes became a famous poet. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Epic Poise: A Celebration of Ted Hughes'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Forty-Five: Poems'
Breaking forty-five years of near-silence on the subject of her life, Frieda Hughes finally opens up through the medium she knows best -- poetry. In this extraordinary collection of personal poems, she takes the reader step-by-step through the difficult and inspirational events that defined each year of her life, and which she encapsulates here. We share her pain through her mother's suicide, her fight against bulimia, three marriages, losing her father to cancer, and her stepmother's rejection. In the face of so much grief, she also shares her successes, her loves, and her ultimate triumphs as an accomplished poet and painter. As she grows older, her narrative unfolds to show a complex life beautifully rendered in her poetry. Hughes is a master of powerful, moving, and vivid language, as seen with the critical success of her past collections, Wooroloo and Waxworks, and never more so than now, as she takes on the topics of life, love, loss, and family. For any lover of poetry or for anyone who wants to know what happened in the life of Frieda Hughes after she so tragically lost her mother, this book is the answer. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Gaudete'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Gaudete Poetry'
A poem from a film idea. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Haunting of Sylvia Plath'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Hawk in the Rain'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Her Husband: Hughes & Plath a Marriage'
Dianne Middlebrook launches Her Husband: Hughes and Plath: A Marriage, appropriately, with the birth of the poets lives together. Through her retelling of the historic moment of their first meeting, Middlebrook sets the balanced, literate, and brutally honest tone that she maintains throughout the book. According to Middlebrook, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughess first encounter was violent and almost mythic, punctuated with kisses and biting. In 112 days they were married. Together, as Middlebrook shows, they formed a unique literary bond. They remained aggressive intellectual and erotic partners. But, six years later, Hughes left Plath and their two children for another woman. She committed suicide shortly after, while Hughes would go on to a long and successful career as a poet and as Plaths literary executor.
What Middlebrook brings to this story, outside of the almost voyeuristic details gleaned from letters, diaries, interviews, and past biographies, is a scholarly commitment to infuse the reading of Hughes and Plaths marriage with a reading of their poetry and prose. In less capable hands, using literature to reconstruct biography can lead to an undisciplined avoidance of real historical research. But Middlebrook drafts the writings to bolster her understanding of the couple in sophisticated ways that link their private language to their public statements in published works (especially Hughes Birthday Letters). At the same time, Middlebrook remains deeply aware that Hughes and Plath worked to re-construct themselves through their writings, often with conflicting self-portraits, for posterity. She is comfortable letting their contradictions exist side by side.
Her Husband is wonderfully told; it is difficult to imagine how this narrative of the marriage could be surpassed. One only hopes that Middlebrook will have the stamina to amend her own workif necessarywhen Hughess most private papers are made public in 2023. --Patrick OKelley [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Her Husband: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath--A Marriage'
Her Husband is a triumph of the biographer?s art and an up-close look at a couple who saw each other as the means to becoming who they wanted to be: writers and mythic representations of a whole generation.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams'
"What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination.... If I sit still and don't do anything, the world goes on beating like a slack drum, without meaning. We must be moving, working, making dreams to run toward; the poverty of life without dreams is too horrible to imagine."
Renowned for her poetry, Sylvia Plath was also a brilliant writer of prose. This collection of short stories, essays, and diary excerpts highlights her fierce concentration on craft, the vitality of her intelligence, and the yearnings of her imaginaton. Featuring an introduction by Plath's husband, the late British poet Ted Hughes, these writings also reflect themes and images she would fully realize in her poetry. Jonny Panic and the Bible of Dreams truly showcases the talent and genius of Sylvia Plath.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Journals of Sylvia Plath'
No other major contemporary American writer has inspired such intense curiosity about her life as Sylvia Plath. Now the intimate and eloquent personal diaries of the twentieth century's most important female poet reveal for the first time the true story behind "The Bell Jar" and her tragic suicide at thirty. They paint, as well, a revealing portrait of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose stature has seldom been equalled.
"A revelation." The New York Times [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Letters Home: Correspondence, 1950-1963'
Will ship immediately. Expedited shipping is available. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Lover of Unreason: The Life and Tragic Death of Assia Wevill'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Lupercal'
The authors second collection which prints some of his most revered work including Pike, Hawk Roosting and November. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Mermaid's Purse'
A collection of children's poems by the late Poet Laureate. All of them are about the sea and some of the characters who live in and around it: a bashful mussel, a boastful limpet, a thieving sandflea, an orphaned seal. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Moortown'

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Other Ariel'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Phaedre'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Phedra'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Remains of Elmet'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'River'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Season Songs'
A collection of twenty-eight poems grouped to represent the four seasons. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Sylvia and Ted: A Novel'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Sylvia Plath'
› Find signed collectible books: 'Sylvia Plath Poems'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Sylvia Plath: Killing the Angel in the House'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Sylvia Plath: Poetics of Beekeeping'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Sylvia Plath : Poetry and Existence'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Sylvia Plath's Selected Poems'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Tales from Ovid'
England's poet laureate Ted Hughes first turned his hand to Ovid's Metamorphoses when he--along with other prominent English-language poets such as Seamus Heaney, Amy Clampitt, and Charles Simic--contributed poems to the anthology After Ovid. In the three years following After Ovid's publication, Hughes continued working with the Metamorphoses, eventually completing the 24 translations collected here. Culling from 250 original tales, Hughes has chosen some of the most violent and disturbing narratives Ovid wrote, including the stories of Echo and Narcissus, Bacchus and Pentheus, and Semele's rape by Jove. Classical purists may be offended at the occasional liberties Hughes takes with Ovid's words, but no one will quarrel with the force and originality of Hughes's verse, or with its narrative skill. This translation is an unusual triumph--a work informed by the passion and wit of Ovid, yet suffused with Hughes's own distinctive poetic sensibility. [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Ted Hughes's Tales from Ovid'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Under the North Star'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose'
Spanning a period of thirty years, a wide-ranging collection of writing about poetry and literature by the Poet Laureate of England includes reflections on the creative process and such figures as Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, and Sylvia Plath. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Winter Trees'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Wodwo'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Wooroloo: Poems'
› Find signed collectible books: 'Phedre'
La collection "Retour au texte" entend offrir à des prix attractifs le texte ou la traduction doeuvres au programme : présentation claire, appareil critique adapté. Elle met à la disposition des élèves un outil de travail pratique et correspondant à leurs besoins. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Phedre'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Cartas De Cumpleanos/ Birthday Letters'
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