I must admit that in the past, I’ve fancied myself as a bit of a Sylvia Plath expert. I was first introduced to her poetry back in 1998, when I was still in high school. Plath's ex-husband Ted Hughes had just produced Birthday Letters, an award-winning book of poems reflecting on his life with her. My English teacher took advantage of all the accompanying Plath/Hughes retrospectives in the newspapers to introduce us to their story, and to her work.

Like a lot of young women both before and since, I was quickly drawn in to the story of this pretty, intense, intelligent, angry girl, who struggled to reconcile her temper, her creative drive, and her sexual desires with her wish to fit in with the Doris Day–like female role models of the 1950s, as well as her genuine desire to succeed as mother and homemaker. I got hold of her collected letters, I read her journals in the library, I got a friend to lend me The Bell Jar — and I can still remember the first time I read through her famous poem "Daddy," sat on the library floor with the book balanced on my knees. I had asked my English teacher to recite it to me, but he had refused, on the grounds that he didn’t think he could do it justice.

It turns out there was a whole area of Plath’s life I had no idea about, though. Editors Kathleen Connors and Sally Bayley have recently published a book — to coincide with what would have been Plath’s 75th birthday — titled Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath’s Art of the Visual.

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