Every month, we shine the light on a book from our collection – one which is new to the library, which has been particularly enjoyed by a borrower, recommended by a volunteer, or which seems salient to the month’s events or happenings. This is the archive of past books of the month from 2024 for your perusal, allowing you to explore books in our collection we’ve highlighted in the past
December: Ariel by Sylvia Plath
This month’s Book of the Month was brought to you by Rachel Robinson! Rachel joined us to carry out her work experience earlier this year, helping out in the library, cataloguing new books, planning and facilitating a workshop, and writing up a few book reviews for these Book of the Month pieces. Thanks so much Rachel for sharing your thoughts and reflections! Here is Rachel’s recommendation for Ariel by Sylvia Plath for December’s Book of the Month:
I would heavily recommend Sylvia Plath as an author and poet. This particular anthology might be a great starting place for anyone who wants to get to know her works, as it sums up her genre and general theme quite well. She’s a poet fit for the colder, sadder seasons with the melancholic aura lots of her poems have.
I genuinely love Sylvia Plath and her works, however, I tend to think of her as more of a one-liner sort of poet. She creates these beautiful phrases that are perfectly poetic and accessible but then slots them into these poems filled with deliberate confusion.
I think almost every poem in this anthology deserves at least a small analysis in this review, however that would be 80 pages of analysis, and that might be taking it slightly too far! So here are some of my favourite poems from Ariel and my personal understanding of them. All of these poems seemed to evoke thoughts of juxtaposed warmth and cold or happiness and sadness, perhaps the definition of winter?
“Berck Plage” is probably my favourite out of the whole anthology, with its beautiful comparison of funerals and weddings. It starts off filled with imagery of medicine, age and religion steadily slipping from age to death and then blurring the lines between funeral and wedding; both being religious ceremonies that marry someone to something (or someone else). I really liked the quote, “soul is a bride/…the groom is red and forgetful”. I think it’s a really interesting idea to link something so sad as death, to something so happy as a wedding, also it’s sort of a wintery idea to have something so sad with something so happy (for example, Christmas or New Years) inherently linked within it – possibly why it resonated with me so much in this cold, cold time. This line jumps out as Plath describing the body as worthless; but in a necessary partnership with the “soul” up until death. By using her wedding symbols after the “old man” in the story dies, she seems to make it seem as though his death is almost re-marrying him, both a divorce of life and a marriage of death. To support this, she makes the comparison this time of the bride and the coffin, both getting walked (or carried) down the aisle.
In this anthology, Plath has two poems of similar name and substance: “Poppies in October” and “Poppies in July”. Personally, I much prefer the later one, “Poppies in July”, as it has many beautiful descriptions or understandings of poppies’ looks and meanings. For example, she describes poppies’ petals as “little bloody skirts” but also as “flames”. She then complains about how they won’t burn her and how she can’t taste the blood, or smell the (odourless) opium. Yet in “Poppies in October”, instead of talking about the poisons of opium, she talks about carbon monoxide, another odourless but deadly substance. These two poems are spread apart, almost in opposite ends of the anthology, which I think was an odd choice as they have such obvious comparisons between the 2, both referring to poppies as wearing “skirts”, both talking about different poisons yet one comparing them to a “love gift”, the other to a “hurt”. However, I was talking about this to some other people and someone suggested that they could be spread apart to show the passing of time throughout the book, which I think is an interesting idea, and definitely a possible explanation for this. The choices of the two different months are where the cold and warm juxtaposition comes in again, with July being the peak of warm weather and October being a large descent into the cold of winter. She might’ve chosen these two months because poppies have always had an association with both sleep and peace. Sleep then links to the fact that animals often hibernate and sleep during the late autumn, winter and early spring months, then to awake in time for July and its warmth.
In “Kindness”, she seems to be sarcastically talking about how nice “kindness” is. At first this is quite an odd idea as niceness and kindness are often thought of as synonymous, however if you read into the poem it seems more like she’s associating at least the word or theoretical idea of “kindness” with someone she knows. This creates a contrast of her view of “kindness” versus the dictionary’s and most people’s, she views it as sad and scary, whilst most people would view “kindness” as nice and happy. From her history and from clues within the poem, I’d assume she was either talking about her husband – Ted Hughes – or about a medical professional. I assume this from phrases like “you hand me two children”, which could either be relating to her in a hospital bed, being handed her children or to the general idea of her husband being the one that gave her her children, in a biological sense. Another example is the word “anaesthetized”, which is obviously easily relatable to a hospital setting, however when paired with the evident fear in the quote before it, it could imply that she’s worried her husband would check her into a mental hospital or similar. She also makes a reference to “kindness” recommending “sugar” as a cure, the sort of thing you’d hear from someone close to you if you were for example feeling ill or tired.
Winter’s the perfect time to read this great book, so if you’re ever feeling particularly grey and want something to relate to your mood, do have a look at it. Plath was such an excellent writer and you never know, she may become your new favourite poet for whenever you need some relatable sorrow!
March: Four Caves of the Heart ed. Myra Schneider and Caroline Price
With International Women’s Day coming up on 8 March 2024, we’re pleased to select the very fitting Four Caves of the Heart from our collection as our Book of the Month for March. Co-edited by Myra Schneider and Caroline Price, this anthology offers the reader more than 80 poems, all written by women. Excitingly, in the years that followed the book’s publication in 2004, poets such as Maggie Sawkins (2013 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry), Barbara Marsh (2015 Troubadour Poetry Prize) and Wendy French (2010 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine, NHS category) won notable awards.
Second Light is described in the book as ‘the network for women poets aged around forty and upwards’ (with the very first poem having the apt title of ‘At Forty’). The network worked with Enitharmon Press and Headland Press to produce two prior anthologies (one anthology each), whereas Four Caves of the Heart was published under Second Light Publications.
In the book’s introduction, Dilys Wood includes a quote from the editors referring to ‘intense personal feelings’, and these feelings can indeed be found, such as in Christine Coleman’s ‘Something Like a Stone’. Coleman closes this poem about sadness with the words ‘I only know / that in my breast lies something like a stone / that was not there a little while ago.’ The ‘cold slab weight’ of a stone on top of a leaf makes an appearance in Sawkins’ poem ‘Under a Stone’, as does the fear the leaf will feel (‘afraid of your own lightness’) when ‘a child will come / and kick away the stone.’
References to women can also be found in Four Caves of the Heart, including Goldilocks (albeit from a fairy tale) as a mother in another poem by Coleman containing the wonderfully creative lines ‘but by the time she married, she couldn’t remember / why even the smell of porridge / could scald her tongue.’ In one of Lynne Wycherley’s poems, she writes from the perspective of Caroline Herschel, who had the distinction of being ‘the first woman to discover a comet’. The reader is presented with what the astronomer might have felt via the words ‘I see a ghost – a blaze of frost / so blue it stops my breath.’
We hope these teasers have enticed you enough to borrow this beautiful anthology that can still be enjoyed two decades after its publication.
Or perhaps you now want to do some writing yourself! We’d love to see you at This Pain Is Not Just Our Own on 9 March from 1pm to 3pm. This workshop at The Community Works will focus on gendered health and imagining collective responses. Interested? Be sure to grab your ticket!
Stay tuned for next month’s book!