9 New Books We Recommend This Week
Dec. 31, 2020
Happy New Year. Have you read any Sylvia Plath lately? Daphne Merkin’s excellent review of a new Plath biography (“Red Comet,” by Heather Clark) sent me back to her early poem “The Beekeeper’s Daughter,” a wonderfully fecund portrait of nature at its most Freudian all sex and death, as nature tends to be and from there to “Ariel,” with its unbeatable sequence of bee poems and daddy issues. You should read those this week, then read Clark’s biography for a fuller sense of the tumultuous life and mind behind the work. And if you’re hungry for more poetry, we also recommend the collection “That Was Now, This Is Then,” by the Pulitzer winner Vijay Seshadri. No bees there but there are “birds fretting at the feeder.”