Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath has been resurrected and writes once again through Kate Moses.She has slid her slender, delicate hand over Moses' as a guide, and erupts upon the pages like ball of fire.The first thing that struck me, was the title. "Wintering" A Novel Of Sylvia Plath...Not A Novel About Sylvia Plath. Kate Moses is so knowledgable about Plath that she becomes her. The language is delectable,lush, and as brillant as Plath. And the vocabulary, well let me put it this way, I kept my dictionary near me throughout the reading. Absolutely superb.Moses uses Plath's last book of poetry, Ariel, as her chapters. Daddy, Lesbos, Fever 103, Ariel, and of course, Wintering. She brings the reader into Plath's state of mind, her thoughts, her feelings for Ted, even surprisingly, her happiness. The reader will feel the dead of winter inside their bones, the moisure freezing inside their nostrils, smell Plath's sour breath down the back of their necks, hear the ringing of phones, bells, and the coughing of sick children."She couldn't wait for the baby bird to die, gasping in it's shoe box with its brave mournful cheeping. Ted taped the box to the bathhose and hooked the gas stove. She was relieved, ashamed at her relief. The birds innocent misery an oppression she was desperate to escape." - WINTERING-Sylvia Plath was not a victim, nor weak. If anything, it is amazing she lasted for as long as she did. I only wish it would have been longer. I shall end this with her own voice..."I simply cannot see where there is to get to." -ARIEL- 1960

Kate Moses seems to have climbed into the very soul of Sylvia Plath and brought her vividly to life on the written page with her stunning novel "Wintering." I read the novel in a 24 hour period, with a well worn copy of Plath's poetry by my side. Ms. Moses recreates the haunted last months of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. She researched her subject extensively and seemingly absorbed into her bloodstream all she read. Plath's skeleton is fleshed out from ink on page and recreated, with an artist's eye, into a vital woman determined to write her poems and raise her family alone. Moses' detail, language and imagery is exquisite and so reminiscent of her subject's that her prose reads like poetry. The book begins at the conclusion of Plath's marriage to poet Ted Hughes. Throughout their tempestuous six years together they shared an extraordinary and mutually productive literary life. They were each other's best critics, and inspired and encouraged the other in their writing careers. The couple had two children, Frieda and Nicholas, still in their infancy when plans for a divorce were made. Their idyllic life together in the English countryside had descended into drama, violence and finally disaster. Hughes left his wife for another woman, a mutual friend, and Plath, in terrible anguish, is left to begin a new life for herself and her babies in a London flat, once occupied by William Butler Yeats. "Wintering" is set in London in December 1962, with flashbacks to the couple's earlier years. Each of the forty-one chapters takes its title and substance from one of the "Ariel" poems, written during the last four months of the poets life. In spite of the quantity of poetry she pours onto the page, Plath is plagued with reoccurring bouts of clinical depression which she fights desperately. It was bitter cold in London that winter, she and her children were sick with the flu, without a telephone and friends. Having betrayed their marriage Hughes has retreated and is relatively unavailable to call on for help. As Sylvia, weakened with fever, is unable to sleep, her tumultuous mind on fire, she writes her poetry through the night. Dark moods and despair threaten to overcome her in her fragile physical and emotional state. She is left to the mercy of the demons which have pursued her since her breakdown, attempted suicide and hospitalization ten years earlier.This book is almost as much about language as it is about the last winter Sylvia Plath spends on earth. But then, so much of Ms. Plath's being was about language. To separate the two would have been an injustice. The author succeeds admirably in doing justice to the poet's work and style. "Wintering" is also about pain - palpable, terrible pain.It is important to note that Kate Moses does not include the suicide in her novel. This is a story of a struggle for life, independence, art and for family. And Plath fought with all the vitality and energy she possessed. Sylvia Plath was a brilliant and prolific

This first work of fiction by Kate Moses accomplishes the impossible: Sylvia Plath comes to life, chapter by chapter, in a way that is accessible and full of extraordinary grace. Immersing herself in the literature of and by Plath, Moses portrays the inner turmoil, spirit and longing that define the poet's genius. Plath is present in each moment of her exceptional existence, whether writer, wife, mother or simply a visionary observer of the world she inhabits.After a traumatic break with her unfaithful husband, Plath is devastated. She rents a cottage, formerly that of the poet Yates, and spends the next few months exploring the nature of her grief, purifying the language of loss and redemption, yet buoyed with hope for the future. At the same time, she cherishes her two small children, inhaling their sweet smells, their innocence, and prepares a comforting home that nurtures them as well as her own surging creativity. Rather than be tormented by ever-present insomnia, Plath instead embraces it, using the sleepless pre-dawn hours to pen her last defining manuscript of poetry, Ariel.As a companion to Wintering, the poems contained in Ariel are revealed in a new light. The poet is energized, cleansed by her newest work and ready to begin the future. As her wayward husband reads the new manuscript, Sylvia understands that she has finally pierced his armor, but at great cost to herself. Exhausted by the fierce emotional battle of the last months, her physical and psychological resources are bankrupt, her once idyllic life shattered. Eventually, Sylvia Plath releases her hold on the world and commits suicide.Wintering is so perfectly rendered as to offer the reader a transcendent experience. Through this luminous novel, a door is opened, revealing the poet's soul, Plath's soaring talent filling the pages with a fire that cannot be extinguished, even by death. This remarkable poet is a staggering talent to be preserved for the next generation to discover anew. Luan Gaines/2003.

This novel is an utterly amazing piece of work. Beautifully written, it goes straight to the heart of Sylvia Plath, a tortured genius whose poetry so aptly depicted the inner demons with whom she fought for all of her short life. The book uses not only the facts of Ms. Plath's life, but also the imagery and symbols of her poetry, interwoven so completely and skillfully that the novel becomes a perfect fictional character study of a real-life person. It would help to have a copy of Plath's posthumously published book of poetry, "Ariel," to refer to as you read the book. The titles of the chapters are those of most of the poems of "Ariel" and the themes, images, and symbols are parallel. As you read her life, Sylvia Plath's inner thoughts are revealed in even more depth by her emotionally charged and intelligent poems.Ted Hughes edited "Ariel" after Sylvia Plath committed suicide, and was criticized for, among other things, leaving out some of the poetry she had written in the days before her death. It is a testament to the power of those poems, Plath's character and of the circumstances of her death that Ted Hughes was never able to free himself of the spectre of his first wife or of her work. The poems of "Ariel" present, with frightening clarity and remarkable directness, the unraveling of a woman's mind and the unapologetic anger, pain, and sorrow she felt when she stared, open-eyed, into her own soul. "Wintering" is not a biography. It is a very creative novel which goes straight to the heart and mind of one of the 20th Century's greatest women poets. It is gut-wrenching and poignant, wonderfully evocative of a place and time, and incredibly perceptive in its characterization of a woman who tried to have hope even though she was haunted by death all of her life. Even if you are not familiar with Sylvia Plath or her poetry (and I had to admit, the last time I read any of her poetry was in grad school, years ago), if you appreciate well written literature, and have the courage to look into the soul of a woman who was utterly tormented by the fear that she would lose all she had come to see as the "miracle" of her life, only to have that fear realized, then I urge you to read this wonderful book.

Most readers who come to this book will already be familiar with the basic story of poet Sylvia Plath, her doomed marriage to author Ted Hughes, and her suicide at age thirty. In "Wintering," one of the Ariel poems, written in the four months before her death in February, 1963, Plath depicts the "real and bloody sacrifice" of this marriage, according to author Kate Moses, "not bodies piled in a mountain pass but her life...the truths fanning out a page at a time." Kate Moses recreates the heart, soul, and psyche of Sylvia Plath in her extraordinary debut novel, Wintering. In preparation for this novel, Moses read virtually every piece of Plath's writing, and most, if not all, of the resource material about Plath. So completely has she distilled this material and incorporated it into the book that the reader feels as if s/he is actually entering the mind of Plath, a Plath who is speaking and reminiscing, conjuring up events, aching, dreaming, and hoping. Astonishingly, Moses achieves this without ever deviating from a third person narrative and without ever speaking as Plath herself.Organizing the novel around the poems which make up the Ariel collection, all written in the last four months of Plath's life, Moses creates a fictional narrative using as chapter titles the names of poems from Ariel, each chapter including some of the imagery from these poems and the subject matter from Plath's life which parallels them. Moses does this naturally, without calling attention to this specific image in that poem, or this event at such and such a point in Plath's life, simply letting the narrative unfold in parallel with the essence and imagery of the poems, a process which feels, remarkably, as if it's unfolding of its own accord. The poems which serve as the impetus to each chapter live on after forty years, continuing to speak to the reader across time and space, and Moses wisely keeps her own narrative in the present tense, suiting her style to that of Plath's poetry. Like the poems, the chapters sieze on images and events in random order, making Moses's achievement in creating a real and memorable narrative out of the creative chaos truly daunting. This not really a novel about Plath, so much as it is a novel in which Plath reveals herself, something she does to even greater effect in her poetry. Because of this, I would strongly urge the reader to find a copy of Plath's Ariel to read in concert with Moses's Wintering. Images from the poems take on added significance when they are repeated and expanded in Moses's narrative; likewise, events from the narrative shed light on some of the intense but sometimes unfocused feeling in the poems. When one knows about the lives of Plath and Ted Hughes and can see the significance in their lives of the repeating images of bees, apples, the moon, food, the earth, and life cycles, their symbolic importance in both the poems and narrative grows, and the reader gains new insights. This is a remarkable novel based on