Word: plath
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Rough Magic is a gripping, exhaustively researched study of the ever-fascinating Sylvia Plath. Paul Alexander is the first biographer to write without the permission of the Hughes estate, and from this stem both the book's weakness and its strength. Had the book been dependent on the approval of the estate, Alexander would never have been able to make the convincing argument that Plath's stormy marriage had a direct, if not causal, relationship to her suicide. On the other hand, the Hughes estate would probably have excised many of Alexander's overly simplistic generalizations...
Admittedly, Plath's story lends itself to soap opera. In the first half of her short 30 years, Plath endured the rending death of her father; a trusting but also accusatory relationship with her mother; and numerous, and at times traumatic, experiences with love and sex. Her desire not just to write but also to publish, expressed at a young age, is startling in its intensity...
From the age of eight, when her first poem was printed in the Boston Herald, Plath began awaiting the mailman with baited breath, her talent perpetually on trial. Her persistence through 10 years of New Yorker rejection slips was finally rewarded. Soon after accepting two poems, the New Yorker offered her a first-reading contract...
Like her contemporary Sylvia Plath, Sexton had a gift of the self- dramatizing and self-destructive kind. She was the mad housewife of Weston, Mass., beautiful if you caught her in the right light, "a possessed witch," as she thought of herself sometimes, "haunting the black air, braver at night." Both Plath and Sexton wound up as cautionary tales. In 1963 Plath stuck her head in an oven in London. Sexton told her psychiatrist, "Sylvia Plath's death disturbs me. Makes me want it too. She took something that was mine, that death was mine!" Eleven years later...
LORI CARSON: SHELTER (Geffen). Sylvia Plath for the CD age. Carson is too insistently sensitive, but this is a debut record. Her ballad, Way of the Past, is a worthy postscript to a love affair; it might even be a route to a bright future...