I've been making slow progress in The Collected Poems: Sylvia Plath, and most happily so. I thought I was reasonably familiar with her earlier stuff but now realise I've encountered hardly anything from 1956 - 57 in any kind of intense reading before, and since this is where this Collected begins, shoving the pre-1956 Juvenilia to the back of the text, this is where I am, and in no hurry to move on any time soon. The verse here is knotty, gnarled, packed with meaning, and very obviously influenced by Ted Hughes. At times it sounds so like Hughes it forces a kind of double-take, but it's also very obviously not just imitation. Plath seems to possess and be possessed by TH, yet there's something so assured in the poems, and something so prescient, that it's as if her voice is whispering behind it.
It's impossible to read a line like, One day I'll have my death of him (from Pursuit) without a bit of a shudder. Amazing, also, the speed with which she picks up northern idioms and wrestles them into new shapes.
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