I read this in around forty minutes between classes, and so many of the poems were ones I had read before in my explorations of Plath’s Collected Poems. Those that resonated with me first continue to; Mirror, Apprehensions, Widow, In Plaster, The Babysitters, I Am Vertical, being old favourites. The Babysitters, written about her and her dear college friend Marcia, remains a poem that calls me to reflect on my closest friends and want to cherish our time together more. There’s a letter Plath wrote where she says her and— I think it was Marcia— were so cold they shared a pair of socks between them; I thought things like that never happened. They do, friendship is so beautiful and authentic. Widow, and In Plaster are some of Plath’s more feminist poems, and led by her marital experience— the latter is amazing in recourse with Duffy’s Pygmalion’s Bride from The World’s Wife, and the last stanza of the former always takes me out. I remember reading Apprehensions for the first time in tutor during the throes of exam season, before crying to my best friend that I thought all my essays were awful and with no life breathed in, due to that emotional state I think Plath’s almost Platonic meditation on how the body condemns us, and more existentially the crisis of purpose of the soul, resonated with my profoundly. Mirror has some of my favourite lines from Plath:

Whilst I cannot say I felt the same thematic unity in the selection of these poems as I did in Winter Trees, they offer reflections on the nature of mortality, marriage, motherhood, predicting Plath’s Ariel, whilst being the refinement of Plath’s The Colossus voice in poems like The Pheasant, and are beautiful thus in tracking her transformation as a poet. Plath is always a five star, through and through.