I have known about Sylvia Plath forever it seems - although she has always dwelled in some "dead & crazy female poets" dungeon inside my head. I have not read a single thing by her and, of course, she was never mentioned even once in high school or college. (Lots of white men were though) I never thought for a second that I would be intrigued by Plath until I read Kate Moses' interview with Donna Seaman in the collection Writers on the Air. (I reviewed it for the January issue of Bookslut.) Moses wrote Wintering, a novel about the last months of Plath's life, and while I recall the buzz it produced when it first came out there seemed to be some backlash about Moses imagining Plath's thoughts and feelings in the weeks leading up to her suicide. I never gave the book much of a thought until I read the interview and Moses explained that she had written the book after learning that Ted Hughes (Plath's estranged husband who was her literary executor) rearranged the poems in Ariel, changing the order in which Plath had placed them. This seemed like such a wrong thing to do - even if it was done with the best of intentions - and I was interested to see what this other woman, Kate Moses, could write about Sylvia Plath and her poems that would fix what Hughes had done. Wintering was on my Christmas list and I'm happy to report that I am now in the third chapter and it is wonderful - funny, sad, honest and heartbreaking. I already know where the book is headed (everyone knows that), but getting there, the way in which Moses dignifies every moment and decision of Plath's last months, is so well done, so smartly done - it's just first rate reading. And then today, while wondering through the Big Box Bookstore about 45 minutes from here (we were on our trip to the big city!), I picked up a copy of Rare Book Review and saw Ted and Sylvia in deep conversation in a snapshot on the cover. RBR is a British magazine, and a very good one, and the article about the poets reviews several of the discoveries in their separate collections at Smith College and Emory. It's great stuff and I couldn't resist it - even with the $10 price tag. Of course what I really need to do is read The Bell Jar and Ariel and even Birthday Letters - none of which I have ever planned to read. But Kate Moses has hooked me on Sylvia Plath - she has made me want to know more about this woman writer. And so 2006 will have some Plath in it for me. What a lovely surprise to have finally discovered her after all this time.

And yet another reason why books like Writers on the Air are to be enjoyed by readers everywhere.