Product Description

With this startling, exhilarating book of poems, which was first published in 1960, Sylvia Plath burst into literature with spectacular force. In such classics as "The Beekeeper's Daughter," "The Disquieting Muses," "I Want, I Want," and "Full Fathom Five," she writes about sows and skeletons, fathers and suicides, about the noisy imperatives of life and the chilly hunger for death. Graceful in their craftsmanship, wonderfully original in their imagery, and presenting layer after layer of meaning, the forty poems in The Colossus are early artifacts of genius that still possess the power to move, delight, and shock.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #127144 in Books
• Published on: 1998-05-19
• Released on: 1998-05-19
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 96 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780375704468
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Review
"Although her work has appeared widely on both sides of the Atlantic, The Colossus, which appeared earlier in England to unusual acclaim [was] her first volume to be published in America. Certainly the Praise bestowed on her by British critics is warranted; Sylvia Plath is indeed a rare talent and a consummate craftsman ... her powerful poems crackle and smoulder with energy ... Miss Plath is not averse to using traditional forms -- she is drawn to various modifications of terza rima, for example -- but her rhymes are mint-new, so often 'slanted' as to be nearly disguised. And like Dylan Thomas, whom she resembles in other ways, she is not afraid of pushing alliteration and assonance to the breaking point."

-- Guy Owen, Books Abroad, University of Oklahoma Press

"Sylvia Plath's eye is sharp ... and her wits responsive to what she sees. She prefers, though, to make you hear what she sees, the texture of her language affording a kind of analog for the experience she presents."

-- Richard Howard, Poetry

"She steers clear of feminine charm,deliciousness, gentility, supersensitivity and the act of being a poet. She simply writes good poetry."

-- A. Alvarez, (London) Observer -- Review

Review
"[Her poems] have that exquisite, heart-breaking quality about them that has
made Sylvia Plath our acknowledged Queen of Sorrows, the spokeswoman for our most
private, most helpless nightmares. . . . Her poetry is as deathly as it is impeccable;
it enchants us almost as powerfully as it must have enchanted her." --Joyce Carol Oates,
The New York Times



"Sylvia Plath's eye is sharp . . . and her wits responsive to what she sees." --Richard Howard,Poetry

"...The Colossus, which appeared earlier in England to unusual acclaim [was] her first volume to be published in America. Certainly the praise bestowed on her by British critics is warranted; Sylvia Plath is indeed a rare talent and a consummate craftsman...her powerful poems crackle and smolder with energy."--Guy Owen, Books Abroad

"She steers clear of feminine charm, deliciousness, gentility, supersensitivity and the act of being a poet. She simply writes good poetry."--Al Alvarez, London Observer

From the Inside Flap
With this startling, exhilarating book of poems, which was first published in 1960, Sylvia Plath burst into literature with spectacular force. In such classics as "The Beekeeper's Daughter," "The Disquieting Muses," "I Want, I Want," and "Full Fathom Five," she writes about sows and skeletons, fathers and suicides, about the noisy imperatives of life and the chilly hunger for death. Graceful in their craftsmanship, wonderfully original in their imagery, and presenting layer after layer of meaning, the forty poems in The Colossus are early artifacts of genius that still possess the power to move, delight, and shock.

Customer Reviews

Achieving Harmony through Conflict: Plath's Word-Sculptures
Sylvia Plath's initial volume of poetry is very much in the formalistic style that was prevalent in the 1950s, but she brings to verse-making a "diction that is galvanized against inertia" (to quote Marianne Moore in a different context), a heavily alliterative, percussive idiom in which we discern kinship to Dylan Thomas and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

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.

Exploring Plath's early work
Sylvia Plath is well reputed as a poet. Her untimely death, at too early an age, silenced her poetic voice. This book represents one of her early works.

Her poetry is not beautiful or lyric or elegiac. There is a hardness, almost a clinical coldness, to the verses, and some dark themes recur. And some odds poems based on intriguingly selected facts.

Of the latter. . . . A stone coffin from the 4th century AD in Cambridge (England) contains skeletons of a woman, a mouse, and a shrew. The woman's ankle bone was slightly gnawed. Here are a couple lines from "All the Dead Dears."

". . .
Relics of a mouse and a shrew
That battened for a day on her ankle-bone.

These three, unmasked now, bear
Dry witness
To the gross eating game. . ."

"The Manor Garden"

"The fountains are dry and the roses over.
Incense of death. Your day approaches.
The pears fatten like little buddhas.
A bleu mist is dragging the lake.

. . . .

Two suicides, the family wolves,
Hours of blankness. . . ."

"Frog Autumn"

"Summer grows old, cold-blooded mother.
The insects are scant, skinny.
In these palustral homes we only
Croak and wither."

And, since I grew up on a farm and--for a time--saw many hogs in our hog house, I cannot resist noting this poem--"Sow."

"God knows how our neighbor managed to breed
His great sow:
Whatever his shrewd secret, he kept it hid...

In the same way
He kept the sow--impounded from public stare,
Prize ribbon and pig show."

If you are interested in the earlier works of Plath, this is an obvious work to explore. As one comment says on the back cover of the book: "[Plath] steers clear of feminine charm, deliciousness, gentility, supersensitivity and the act of being a poet. She simply writes good poetry."

does not make the art of writing good poems seem easy
The Colossus," from what I understand, was Plath's first published collection of poetry. During this early phase of Plath's career, she still treated the act of writing poetry as a laborious and painstaking process, often diligently lookig up words in the thesaurus and then inserting many synonyms of one word into a single composition. This rather pedantic attitude toward poetry shows in these poems, many of which devoutly adhere to difficult rhyme schemes (albeit frequently using slant rhymes) and all of which are marked by a studied attention to detail, both visual and sonic. These poems simply don't *soar* the way the free-verse poems in "Ariel" (Plath's second book) do; they are just not as vibrant or as lively as her later work. These are bleak poems, characterized by a wealth of vivid tactile detail, but somewhat lacking in color and movement. Plath frequently uses the terza-rima rhyme scheme that Dante patented, as though to suggest that life, for her, is a slow, laborious plod into (or through?) hell. In this book, Plath shows that she can write good poems, but she does not make the art of writing good poems seem easy.

I do not, however, mean to imply that this is not a useful book for aspiring poets to read. It is, doubtless, a very important book to read if one wishes to understand how Plath developed into the brilliant, oracular voice that spouted "Ariel." And since Sylvia Plath started writing poetry seriously at a very early age, it is perhaps unfair to dismissively refer to this book -- which she published at the ripe old age of 25 -- as her "early work." There are many remarkable things about this book, not the least of which is the way Plath elevates mundane topics (e.g., men working the night shift, or prize pigs) to the level of high poetry, armoring them with an impervious Dante-esque dignity. To Plath, even the smallest things in life are worthy of attention.