This collection of poems appeared six years after Plath achieved posthumous fame with Ariel. It contains some poems included in the U. S. edition of that volume. It’s understandable that when a powerful poet of Plath’s caliber dies young, there is a demand to read everything she left behind. Unsurprisingly, the book is uneven in quality. Some of the poems feel unfinished. Even some of those that seem finished are opaque.
One of the final poems, “The Swarm,” was at first one of those that seemed inaccessible. Then, after putting it aside, I remembered that Napoleon had chosen the bee, in place of the Bourbon fleur-de-lys, as his symbol. I reread the poem and found that it made sense and provided a key to help me understand some of the other poems. But it involves treading lightly. Some say a poem must be read on its own terms, without recourse to biography. Yet I can’t help it; I recall that Plath, the daughter of an entomologist, was an amateur bee-keeper. So are these swarms hers, too, as well as Napoleon’s? Another biographical reach: apparently, things were not going well in her marriage at the time (a situation that seems to underly poems such as “For a Fatherless Son” and “Lesbos”). Is that suspicion helpful here, too? Is the tyrant Napoleon transparent for the absent husband?
Once one sees these possible avenues of interpretation, it seems that other poems here also mix the historical with the personal. Not a big surprise. In Plath’s famous poem, “Daddy,” she conflates her long-dead father with Nazi torturers. The rage expressed in that poem is also present in several of these. Even in some of the less-accessible poems, the anger is palpable.
I can’t help but feel, as well, that the virtuosic connections Plath makes between the personal and the historical is not only a sign of her poetic genius but is also, perhaps, a symptom. Conversations with the mentally ill, schizophrenics, for instance, leave me amazed at their ability to tie events together and to manipulate language in a way that places them in the center of a web in which it is all about them.
I know I’m veering here into a controversial area, and I’m certainly not an expert. I’m also chary of making assertions about someone I never knew. Still, others more knowledgeable than I have speculated on the relation of genius and madness. I’d like to believe there is no necessary connection between the two, even though their boundary is porous.
Above all, I don’t mean to suggest we should reduce Plath’s poems to a collection of rough drafts for an eventual suicide note. Poetry they are. One thing that struck me reading this collection so soon after reading The Colossus, the only volume of poems to appear in her lifetime, is that in many of these, Plath is writing more for the ear, for reading aloud. One of the most successful pieces here is a radio play, Three Women, evoking the radically different experiences of three expectant mothers in a maternity ward. ( )

Intolerable vowels enter my heart—Sylvia Plath, 'Event'

It's been a very long time since I read Ariel, so perhaps it's wrong to compare it with this book without first rereading that celebrated collection. But I loved this book, and I don't remember feeling the same connection to Ariel. These and the Ariel poems were all written in the last year of Plath's life which, if we can dare to characterize it based on the content of these poems, was largely a bleak and desperate one. According to Ted Hughes, the Ariel poems were "more or less arbitrarily chosen" from among this last batch of Plath's work. I find this interesting, considering how Ariel went on to become her most popular and famous book, when apparently it could just as easily have been this one. For whatever reason, though, Ariel resonated stronger in the ears of critics and readers alike. In the poems of this book, though, Plath commands the English language to do stunning and sometimes unsettling things. Some lines are so alive I could see, hear, and feel the contents of the poem move through me. Struck matches flared in my head. I guess it's now time to reread Ariel. ( )

Winter Trees is the last collection of Plath's poems, written in the last months of her life and while many were printed in various magazines previously, some were published here for the first time. Oddly enough, it's my first collection of Plath poetry -- I've read her prose before and some of her poems here and there but never a full collection before this one. I enjoyed that she doesn't use standard rhyme and meter here but is pretty much free form. Her poems are dark but also witty at times, and my favorite poems from this collection were "For a Fatherless Son" and "Child."

Also published here is a radio play Three Women written for and produced by the BBC. It is Plath's first and only piece of dramatic writing. Billed as "a poem for three voices," this is a play more in the style of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood than Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire (i.e., it is more about the flowery language and spoken word than about having a three- or five-act plot complete with climax, denouement, etc.). The play takes place in a maternity ward, with the first voice belonging to a happily pregnant woman going into labor, the second voice to a woman experiencing yet another miscarriage, and the third voice to an unhappily pregnant woman going into labor. The juxtaposition of the three scenarios is particularly effective, more emotive, I think, than if the three stories were told separately. I was particularly taken by the sorrow of the second voice, such as when she says:

I am not ugly. I am even beautiful.
The mirror gives back a woman without deformity.
The nurses give back my clothes, and an identity.
It is usual, they say, for such a thing to happen.
It is usual in my life, and the lives of others.
I am one in five, something like that. I am not hopeless.
I am beautiful as a statistic. Here is my lipstick.

I draw on the old mouth. The red mouth I put by with my identity
A day ago, two days ago, three days ago. It was a Friday.
I do not even need a holiday; I can go to work today.
I can love my husband, who will understand.
Who will love me through the blur of my deformity
As if I had lost an eye, a leg, a tongue.
...
I am myself again. There are no loose ends.
I am bled white as wax, I have no attachments.
I am flat and virginal, which means nothing has happened,
Nothing that cannot be erased, ripped up and scrapped,
   begun again.
These little black twigs do not think to bud,
Nor do these dry, dry gutters dream of rain.
...
It it I. It is I --
Tasting the bitterness between my teeth.
The incalculable malice of the everyday.

How haunting. And I absolutely love that final line, which seems so appropriate for any host of disappointments.

All and all, this slim collection is a great primer of Plath’s works and I’d recommend for anyone with an interest in poetry. ( )