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Katherine Rundell
Rave Hudson Review Vivid ... In celebrating Donne’s originality and arresting language, Rundell herself aims to follow his example. She salts her pages with startling analogies, the best of which suggest the flavor of his times ... Her novel approach to organizing the biography is more effective than her hit-or-miss metaphors. Refusing to follow convention and split the life into two phases and two corresponding personae...or just as reductively divide the exuberant early love poetry from the later, but equally passionate religious writing, Rundell showcases his multiple identities in lively, short chapters that invite reading ... Each chapter focuses on a distinct transformation of Donne’s life, yet encompasses animating themes and habits of mind found everywhere in his writing.
Sylvia Plath
Positive The Hudson Review The letters in this new volume—particularly the full texts of Plath’s correspondence with her mother and the fourteen newly discovered letters to Dr. Beuscher—not only document what she experienced during her last months, but also resonate verbally and thematically with the poems ... Whether documenting the years that led up to this formative crisis or exposing the anguish Plath suffered in the midst of it, this new volume of letters throws familiar elements of the story—and of Plath’s poems—into a stark new perspective. The book abounds in dramatic irony ... although the letters from July 1962 onward are harrowing, the previous 790 pages, despite the banality of the domestic details that snowball as Plath devotes herself to homemaking and motherhood, also exact a toll, for, like the audience of a Greek tragedy, readers know what lies ahead. More than the suicide, Hughes’s eventual betrayal retrospectively colors the first three quarters of the book, especially Plath’s glowing descriptions of their productive literary relationship and the praise she lavishes on him ... the dramatic ironies that punctuate Plath’s letters also resonate so sharply because of the intensity with which she records her experiences. Readers may therefore have the uncanny sense of viewing Plath’s letters in stereoscope: of witnessing a life lived, in real time, through the vividness of her recounting, but also reading retrospectively, so that foreknowledge of what lies ahead hones her words to a double edge ... the book’s real distinction lies in the clarity of her writing. As in the Ariel poems, she writes from the depths of crisis with precision, emotional acuteness, and dashes of black humor ... The Letters of Sylvia Plath: Volume 2 should renew readers’ appreciation of her achievement—and mend some of the damage done by her twentieth-century editors.
Sylvia Plath, ed. by Peter K. Steinberg & Karen V. Kukil
Positive The Hudson Review In this collection of letters, Sylvia Plath creates herself, narratively, stylistically, and imaginatively. The reward of reading through this long book is watching the process unfold, as Plath gains agency, self-confidence, and adeptness in her lifelong project of self-fashioning ... The Letters of Sylvia Plath makes clear that she crafted different versions of herself for different correspondents, variously including and occluding details about her experiences and shifting her tone and style, depending on whom she addressed. What truth we can find about her, therefore, arises from reading the whole volume and witnessing how Plath’s development as a person deeply intertwines with her increasing power, range, and stylistic control as a writer ... Reading through the letters to her mother, which Plath wrote at great length and with great frequency, is a slog, due to the monotony of cheerful affect and the obsessive recount­ing of what she did when, where, and how ... The pre-high school letters, many sent from Girl Scout camp, are especially tedious. Yet they reveal aspects of Plath’s character and style that carry over into adulthood ... The second half of the volume is therefore much more engaging than the first half. Plath’s increasing power as a writer, the variety of her responses to different correspondents, and her enthusiastic accounts of living in England and traveling on the Continent contrast to the sameness of her pre-breakdown letters to mom.