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Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue
Pour of tor and distances
- Ariel, Sylvia Plath

I fell back in love with Sylvia Plath with these fascinatingly complex and morbid poems - but I think I fell in love with Frieda Hughes along the way, with her beautifully composed foreword, eloquent interview, and her singular vitriolic poem at the end of this collection. So I'm going to review them both.

If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating.
- The Rival, Sylvia Plath

I have over a hundred highlights from this book and a newfound appreciation for poetry anthologies. Each poem by Plath drips raw creativity, passion, and depressive emotion (and savage vitriol towards her adulterous husband, her parents, and society). In the collection, they drill home the beauty of these emotions compounded and referenced across poems, with complex imagery, which constructs a landscape as inventive as any fantasy. Frieda Hughes said it best:

She used every emotional experience as if it were a scrap of material that could be pieced together to make a wonderful dress; she wasted nothing of what she felt, and when in control of those tumultuous feelings she was able to focus and direct her incredible poetic energy to great effect.

Plath's poems are searing indictments of the world, vicious at times, and hold nothing back. They are both autobiographical and masterful scene construction, hiding her message in fiction. At other times, her poems are sinisterly prophetic of her future, of the carbon monoxide that caused her death, the year that she died, and the morbid voyeurism that will follow her story for decades. Of course, her poems include loving praises of her children, nature, and animals, but these often co-exist with darker subtexts in the very next verse. There are truly worlds hidden in this collection, which are a delight to sink into. I can't include all my favorite verses here, because that would be a couple hundred lines - but here's one that is chilling in its premonition and beautiful in its diction.

They are carbon monoxide.
Sweetly, sweetly I breathe in,
Filling my veins with invisible, with the million
Probable motes that tick the years off my life.
- A Birthday Present, Sylvia Plath

Frieda Hughes, a masterful poet in her own right, ends this edition with her poem deriding the 2003 film based on Sylvia Plath. It is a beautiful, heartfelt, and wrathful poem based on her hatred of the drudging up of her mother's suicide by the media.

They are killing her again.
She said she did it
One year in every ten,

Now they want to make a film
For anyone lacking the ability
To imagine the body, head in the oven,
Orphaning children. Then
It can be rewound
So they can watch her die
Right from the beginning again.
- My Mother, Frieda Hughes

5/5 beautiful stars.