Red Comet

The first biography of this great and tragic poet that takes advantage of a wealth of new material, this is an unusually balanced, comprehensive and definitive life of Sylvia Plath.Determined not to read Plath''s work as if her every act, from childhood on, was a harbinger of her tragic fate, Clark presents new materials about Plath''s scientist father, her juvenile writings, and her psychiatric treatment, and evokes a culture in transition in the mid-twentieth century, in the shadow of the atom bomb and the Holocaust, as she explores Sylvia''s world: her early relationships and determination not to become a conventional woman and wife, her conflicted ties to her well-meaning, widowed mother, her troubles at the hands of an unenlightened mental-health industry, and her Cambridge years and thunderclap meeting with Ted Hughes, a true marriage of minds that would change the course of poetry in English.Clark''s clear-eyed sympathy for Hughes, his lover Assia Wevill, and other demonized players in the arena of Plath''s suicide promotes a deeper understanding of her final days, with their outpouring of first-rate poems. Along with illuminating readings of the poems themselves, Clark''s meticulous, compassionate research brings us closer than ever to the spirited woman and visionary artist who blazed a trail that still lights the way for women poets the world over.