Links, reviews, etc. - Week ending 22 November 2008

Regina Marler of Truthdig reviews Letters of Ted Hughes. Thanks to Lucy Berbeo for the referral.
Sheila Farr reviews Letters of Ted Hughes in the Seattle Times.
Frieda Hughes's most installment in the Daily Mail appeared this week. Read "The magpie who came to stay: Artist Frieda Hughes has an unexpected house guest to her dream garden".
Somehow I missed her 10 November contribution, "Rocky days, stormy nights: How Frieda Hughes transformed a desolate one-acre field into the garden of her dreams".
Published recently is a collection of poems by Jim Long of Honolulu, HI. Between Wings: Poems is available through Lulu.com. Many of the readers of this blog will be familiar with Jim through his masterful, eloquent, and thoughtful contributions to Elaine Connell's Sylvia Plath Forum. In addition to the preview available through Lulu.com, two of Jim's poems were posted on the Forum. Read "Edgelit" and "Epitaph for Sylvia". My copy is on its way to me now.
I added a couple of new book covers to the website, A celebration, this is, this week due to the kindess of strangers. They are:
Jennifer Draskau's The liberation of Sylvia Plath's Ariel psychosemantics and a glass sarcophagus. Publications on English themes, v. 15. [Copenhagen]: Dept. of English, University of Copenhagen, 1991.
Sylvia Plath's Letters Home, the Bantam edition from 1977. There was an image of this online already, however, this is a much improved scan.
If you have books - in English or not in English - that are not on 'A celebration, this is', I would truly appreciate your sending me scans of the covers for inclusion in the book cover gallery. The gallery of non-English titles is particularly weak.
Submissions to Volume 2 of Plath Profiles are coming in, and I am writing to encourage more!! Visit Plath Profiles to read Volume 1.

Early next week I should have a posting ready about that one unique item I saw at the Boston Book Fair; just waiting on images & a translation.

Famous Quotes of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath inspires us all in various and wonderful ways. She is in many respects a form of comfort to us, which is something that Esther Greenwood expresses in The Bell Jar , about a bath: "There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: 'I'll go take a hot bath.'" We read and remember Sylvia Plath for many reasons, many of them deeply personal and private. But we commemorate her, too, in very public ways, as Anna of the long-standing Tumblr Loving Sylvia Plath , has been tracking, in the form of tattoos. (Anna's on Instagram with it too, as SylviaPlathInk .) The above bath quote is among Sylvia Plath's most famous. It often appears here and there and it is stripped of its context. But I think most people will know it is from her nove

Sylvia Plath's Gravestone Vandalized

The following news story appeared online this morning: HEPTONSTALL, ENGLAND (APFS) - The small village of Heptonstall is once again in the news because of the grave site of American poet Sylvia Plath. The headstone controversy rose to a fever pitch in 1989 when Plath's grave was left unmarked for a long period of time after vandals repeatedly chiseled her married surname Hughes off the stone marker. Author Nick Hornby commented, "I like Plath, but the controversy reaching its fever pitch in the 80s had nothing to do with my book title choice." Today, however, it was discovered that the grave was defaced but in quite an unlikely fashion. This time, Plath's headstone has had slashed-off her maiden name "Plath," so the stone now reads "Sylvia Hughes." A statement posted on Twitter from @masculinistsfortedhughes (Masculinists for Ted Hughes) has claimed responsibility saying that, "We did this because as Ted Hughes' first wife, Sylvia de

Sylvia Plath and McLean Hospital

In August when I was in the final preparations for the tour of Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar sites, I found that I had long been mistaken about a couple of things. This is my coming clean. It was my intention in this blog post to discuss just McLean, but I found myself deeply immersed in other aspects of Plath's recovery. The other thing I was mistaken about will be discussed in a separate blog post. I suppose I need to state from the outset that I am drawing conclusions from Plath's actual experiences from what she wrote in The Bell Jar and vice versa, taking information from the novel that is presently unconfirmed or murky and applying it to Plath's biography. There is enough in The Bell Jar , I think, based on real life to make these decisions. At the same time, I like to think that I know enough to distinguish where things are authentic and where details were clearly made up, slightly fudged, or out of chronological order. McLean Hospital was Plath's third and last

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