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Crossing the Water
Contributor(s): Plath, Sylvia (Author)
ISBN: 0060907894     ISBN-13: 9780060907891
Publisher: Harper Perennial
OUR PRICE:   $11.69  
Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats
Published: May 1980
Qty:
Annotation:
Wuthering Heights

The horizons ring me like fag-gots,
Tilted and disparate, and always unstable.
Touched by a match, they might warm me,
And their fine lines singe
The air to orange
Before the distances they pin evaporate,
Weighting the pale sky with a solider color.
But they only dissolve and dissolve
Like a series of promises, as I step forward.

There is no life higher than the grasstops
Or the hearts of sheep, and the wind
Pours by like destiny, bending
Everything in one direction.
I can feel it trying
To funnel my heat away.
If I pay the roots of the heather
Too close attention, they will invite me
To whiten my bones among them.

The sheep know where they are,
Browsing in their dirty wool-clouds,
Grey as the weather.
The black slots of their pupils take me in.
It is like being mailed into space,
A thin, silly message.
They stand about in grandmotherly disguise,
All wig curls and yellow teeth
And hard, marbly baas.

I come to wheel ruts, and water
Limpid as the solitudes
That flee through my fingers.
Hollow doorsteps go from grass to grass;
Lintel and sill have unhinged themselves.
Of people the air only
Remembers a few odd syllables.
It rehearses them moaningly:
Black stone, black stone.

The sky leans on me, me, the one upright
Among all horizontals.
The grass is beating its bead distractedly.
It is too delicate
For a life in such company;
Darkness terrifies it.
Now, in valleys narrow
And black as purses, the house lights
Gleam like smallchange.
Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- Poetry | American - General
- Fiction
- Poetry | Women Authors
Dewey: 811.54
LCCN: 71138756
Physical Information: 0.23" H x 5.39" W x 7.99" (0.19 lbs) 64 pages
 
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
Publisher Description:

Crossing the Water is a 1971 posthumous collection of poetry by Sylvia Plath that was prepared for publication by Ted Hughes. These poems were written at the same time as those that appear in Ariel. Crossing the Water continues to push the envelope between dark and light, between our deep passions and desires that are often in tension with our duty to family and society. Water becomes a metaphor for the surface veneer that many of us carry, but Plath explores how easily this surface can be shaken and disturbed.

Contributor Bio(s): Plath, Sylvia: -

Sylvia Plath was born in 1932 in Massachusetts. Her books include the poetry collections The Colossus, Crossing the Water, Winter Trees, Ariel, and Collected Poems, which won the Pulitzer Prize. A complete and uncut facsimile edition of Ariel was published in 2004 with her original selection and arrangement of poems. She was married to the poet Ted Hughes, with whom she had a daughter, Frieda, and a son, Nicholas. She died in London in 1963.