Meltdown

Anthony Thwaite

  • Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath by Anne Stevenson
    Viking, 413 pp, £15.95, October 1989, ISBN 0 670 81854 2

Writing a BBC Third Programme review of Donald Hall’s Penguin Contemporary American Poetry exactly a month before she killed herself early in 1963, Sylvia Plath praised ‘the inwardness of these images ... the uncanny faculty of melting through the leaves of the wallpaper, through the dark looking-glass, into a world which one can only call surrealist and irrational’. It was a process she could see happening in herself, to her own poems, and she welcomed it:

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[*] Chatto, 282 pp., £12.95, 0 7011 3126 8.