#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream
Ice in the wetlands
It was a gorgeous and emotional walk. There was ice lasting in the wetlands. And I listened to the final hour of the Sylvia Plath biography on audible. The final of 54 hours! And I wanted to have some time to experience the closure of this fascinating and comprehensive biography. I wanted to have some freedom to feel the feelings of sadness, and I did, roaming the wetlands, passing the river, stepping over the broken branches, and going by the garden. It was a satisfying and disturbing and poignant. An awesome, scholarly book. A very beautiful and painful book, an account of a tragic and amazing life.
“Plath’s readers have now waited almost 60 years (more than “a bit”) for more of that Truth, plowing through previous biographies colored by the misogyny of the times, sensationalism around her death, or the early women’s movement’s fanatical search for a face. In “Red Comet,” her massive, insightful new Plath biography, Heather Clark seeks an objective balance those earlier books were missing.” [Valerie Duff, Boston Globe review]
A busy day, and I was quite overtired, not having slept well last night for some reason. Monday nights are like that, I think. I’m over-juiced from poetry workshop or something. Still, I got much done. It is almost my daughter’s birthday. A year ago on her birthday we left Florida to drive home at the start of the pandemic. So much changed in March. I am so sleepy tonight I’m not sure I can even dip into the Frank O’Connor biography I am reading in paperback. I feel such an absence––the Plath, over and done.
