by Tom Mooney
Elizabeth Bishop changed and chopped One Art so often that somebody thought it a providential idea to accumulate all the drafts, close to twenty with emendations and revisions, and write a book about it, Edgar Allen Poe & the Juke Box.
Sylvia Plath, the fiftieth anniversary of whose death was last week, ran out of time with what is believed to have been her last poem, Sheep in Fog. She had a tendency, particularly in the last six months of what was a frenzied period of creativity, to date when her poems were written and when they were revised.
So we know, in spite of her personal turmoil, the on set of the coldest winter in living memory and the round the clock needs of a young daughter and a baby son, she somehow managed to bookend ten poems in November and three in July with an outpouring of twenty seven poems in four autumnal weeks which, even with the remove of five decades and the eclipse of her more complex poems by her gargantuan legend, is astonishing.
For Plath just didn’t merely write twenty seven poems at a juncture in her short life when she was emotionally compromised, and whom today you would not let out of your sight for 24 hours, but she wrote 27 poems of unprecedented clarity and integrity, the confessional tirade of a wounded animal which sent a tremour throught the English literary establishment, weaned on female poets like Ivy Compton-Burnett and Stevie Smith.
Her death overnight transformed the direction of confessional poetry – her Boston colleague in arms, Anne Sexton, whose Transformations was staged by Wexford Festival Opera, also took her own life, as did John Berryman – and the consequence of her husband’s infidelity, as the decisive catalyst in her emotional decline, though she was no ingenue, polarised opinion about him for decades.
It is refreshing, therefore, that Mr. Hughes cannot be held accountable for the latest Sylvia Plath controversy, the decision by Faber to repackage her only novel The Bell Jar as chick lit, with a cover showing a young woman attending to her lips, a marketing move justified as appealing to women uninterested in her poetry.
Would Path have approved? Unlikely, as Faber’s Lolita makeover, to get as much shelf space in Tesco as in Waterstones, has rendered it as a book fit to be read by women only which, of course, it isn’t.
Sheep in Fog saw the light of day two months before she died on December 2nd as Fog Sheep: she altered the poem significantly after the first draft, but appears to have made one sizeable change between the third and final draft, a new final stanza:
They threatened
To let me through to a heaven
Starless and fatherless, a dark water.
It is impossible not to feel for her, the children put to bed, typing the five short verses in her Fitzroy Road apartment late at night, the snow falling gently outside on a city that was not her own, the blank page as she once recorded in her diary ‘a curse to me crimes, a spur to my remedies.’
Though she was fond of |Ireland, was a friend of Richard Murphy and influenced a generation of poets like Eavan Boland, the fiftieth anniversary of Sylvia Plath’s death passed without a ripple, bar a compelling tribute to her by John Bowman on RTE Radio One and a reading at the University of Ulster last night.
Coincidentally, on the same day that a great literary talent was snuffed out, four young men from Liverpool walked into a studio in London and recorded, in one session, the first Beatles album
