Fifteen poems released in time for the year 2015. It is just right that the new generation will have the chance along with us who have journeyed this earth quite some time to hear, to experience the poems of the late Sylvia Plath.
While I am well aware that it is inevitable to also know the apparently sad even painful parts of her life (difficult childhood, problematic marriage, suicide), I think this awareness should even give us more reason to respect and appreciate the brilliance of her work. In fact, her life and her literary legacy is a testimony that pain along with love can be a powerful place to write from as well as to write for.
The poetry collection Ariel from where these poems were gathered from had its first publication in 1965, two years after Plath's death. It was her late husband, Poet Laureate Ted Hughes, who oversaw this publication wherein he made changes both in the order of poems as Plath had arranged them as well as what poems should be included/dropped from the collection. But it is in its 2004 publication where the selection and arrangement of the poems were restored as Plath had left them. And I agree that it should be so. It is Plath's poetry after all.
Plath had received a posthumous Pullitzer prize for one of her poetry collections The Collected Poems and had been known for powerfully initiating confessional poetry as a genre. It is thus a precious gift to have this opportunity to hear her now through this album full of life, full of poetry.
Plath's life may have been cut short but her words even today defy death. They have a life of their own, allowing us not only to read her side of both beauty and darkness but they also help us birth some poetry of our own.
