It is difficult to read Sylvia Plath, one of the finest poets of the 20th century, without the knowledge and half-knowledge of her life and death intruding and cementing meaning on to her work.
This, her second collection, published posthumously in 1965, contains some of her most fabulously versatile and energetic verse despite her preoccupation with death which is often as theatrical as it is agonising. The volume begins as she wanted with Morning Song, a colourful, rich poem to her baby: Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
Also included are many of her best-known poems such as Lady Lazarus, Daddy and Fever 103 degrees which were all written between the publication in 1960 of Plath's first book, The Colossus, and her death in 1963.
