The Voice of the Poet: Sylvia Plath

There are poems here to warm your heart, and others to chill your blood. The 1957 poem "Sow" is a glorious celebration of the muddiness and bloodiness of thriving, procreating life, redolent of the optimistic romanticism of Wordsworth or Robert Graves. When we get to the later recordings, on side two, the poet's nerve ends are raw-exposed. "Daddy", with its dark and terrible imagery - "Every woman adores a fascist, the boot in the face..." - makes you wonder exactly how her father, who died when she was a child, behaved toward her. That and "Lady Lazarus" are about as dark as poetry can get. Not every poet is the best reader of their work, but Plath conveys her agony in these recordings in a way that surely no one else could do. If you are prepared to probe the very centres of poetic pain, get this tape.

This cassette is an amazing recording. Hearing Plath read her poems "Lady Lazarus" and "Ariel" is an experience beyond compare. Hearing the intonation of her voice leads one closer to discovering another dimension to the poetry beyond that written on the page. Her poems are works of art that are brought to a new plateau when she infuses her voice. They begin to stand in a new space, replicating the motion that her poem "Ariel" describes.

This tape is amazing. From the moment I first read Plath's poetry, I longed to hear her read it herself. Her poetry is so extremely personal. The sound of her voice makes the poetry all the more powerful. This tape also allows the listener to hear the beauty of the words and the rhythm of Plath's works.

Listening to these recordings is a haunting experience. Plath recorded Side A when she was 25 and in the full blush of newlywed happiness. Like the rigidly structured poems of "The Colossus," Plath's delivery of these earlier poems reflects a painstaking adherence to precision of pronunciation and form. However, turn to Side B, recorded five years later on October 30th, 1962--three days after her 30th birthday, three months before her suicide--and you are at once stunned by the harrowing transformation in both Plath's voice and poetry. These are the "Ariel" poems, the poems that Plath herself declared to be "the best poems of my life; they will make my name." Here, it is clear that all hope and vitality has been sapped, and all that is left are the charred remains of her former self--bruised and beaten, suffocating in a self-made grave of self-loathing and regret. Listen closely, and you can hear the faint murmuring of traffic outdoors, or the gentle shuffling of papers and creaking of wooden drawers. You are lost in her world, locked in her slow destruction. Sylvia Plath's pain bleeds from these recordings, and you will not walk away from them unstained.

If you are thinking about purchasing this tape and are a Plath fan, I urge you to stop just thinking about it, and buy it! It is worth the money, and worth the time to wait for it to arrive in the mail. Sylvia Plath reads her own work so well, and with such clarity that you will probably never look at poetry the same way. Listening to them is like listening to stories, especially so on side B of the tape where she reads from her later works including "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus." Side A is her earlier work, her heavily structured poems, and crisp voice. Each word is pronounced so exactly correct, it does tend to get a little annoying. I do not listen to Side A as much as side B, let's just say that. You can hear the different sound so well between the two that it seems like two seperate people. The one "in plaster" and the one without. Buy it! :)