"Crossing the Water, a collection of poems written just prior to those in Ariel, . . . is of immense importance in recording [Plath's] extraordinary development. One senses on every page a voice coming into its own, the chaos of a lifetime at last getting ready to assume its final, triumphant shape." — Kirkus Reviews
Sylvia Plath's extraordinary collection pushes the envelope between dark and light, between our deep passions and desires that are often in tension with our duty to family and society. Water becomes a metaphor for the surface veneer that many of us carry, but Plath explores how easily this surface can be shaken and disturbed.
Author Info
Sylvia Plath was born in 1932 in Massachusetts. Her books include the poetry collections The Colossus, Crossing the Water, Winter Trees, Ariel, and Collected Poems, which won the Pulitzer Prize. A complete and uncut facsimile edition of Ariel was published in 2004 with her original selection and arrangement of poems. She was married to the poet Ted Hughes, with whom she had a daughter, Frieda, and a son, Nicholas. She died in London in 1963.
Reviews
"Of immense importance in recording her extraordinary development. One senses on every page a voice coming into its own, the chaos of a lifetime at last getting ready to assume its final, triumphant shape." — Kirkus Reviews
"These poems are uniquely transitional. The intense control and the maturity found here are not matched in the earlier, youthful Colossus or in the later, tortured Ariel. This short middle period gives us Plath at her most sophisticated and skilled." — Antioch Review
