A Poet's Guide to Britain

A Poet's Guide to Britain - The Book

This post is a follow-up on the recent BBC Poet's Guide to Britain, which featured Sylvia Plath's poem "Wuthering Heights" (as well as "The Great Carbuncle" and "Hardcastle Crags" a.k.a. "Nocturne" and "Night Walk")...

Amazon.co.uk lists a book version of A Poet's Guide to Britain, Owen Sheer's recent BBC Four series highlight six poets and six poems about inspired by the beautiful British landscape. The cover, left, features nice notches, don't you think? Reminds me of Hilda's hats ("Bile green. They were promoting it for fall, only Hilda, as usual, was half a year ahead of time. Bile green with black, bile green with white, bile green with nile green, its kissing cousin.")!

The product description, pasted below, is rambling. Just read the last sentence to know what the book, a tie-in anthology, will include.

"Six films about six very different poems from six different places in the British Isles. Each film tells the story of a poem - where it comes from, how it works and the nature and reach of its influence and legacy. Each film will be structured as a journey through that particular landscape. Overall these are films that open up not just the ideas of individual poems but also the idea of poetry itself. Each poem will be explored and analyzed in detail with locals and leading figures in the contemporary arts. Presenter Owen Sheers passionately believes that poems, and particularly poems of place, not only affect us as individuals, but can have the power to mark and define a collective experience - our identities, our country, our land. He has chosen six powerful poems, all personal favourites, and all poems that have become part of the way we see our landscape. The tie-in anthology of the series will follow a similar format to the series itself while also offering additional poems about the landscape and nature of Britain."

Look for this book, published by Penguin Classics, around October 29, 2009.

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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...

Some final photographs of Sylvia Plath

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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...

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