Ariel

Wife of poet Ted Hughes, mother of two children, Miss Plath published a first book of poetry in 1960, and died in 1963, aged thirty. Fragments of this brief biography whirl through this extraordinary, fiery, and fiercely lucid poetry. Children are seen with intense love, but also as cool, vast, mythic. Flowers, landscapes, bees, people, time, are also viewed with extreme simplicity and with the tremendous power of myth. But it is Death that dominates the volume; not as a macabre figure but as a vantage point, a savage, impersonal magnifying glass that heightens all perceptions to a terrible, almost Joyous, burning sense of a reality not only stripped and being stripped of all the normal baggage of life, but seen all anew, and for the last time. The many poems about death and dying have a splendor, a purity and violence, that is far beyond merely personal statement. A remarkable, hauntingly vivid book. (Kirkus Reviews)