Your Own, Sylvia: A Verse Portrait of Sylvia Plath

Your Own, Sylvia: A Verse Portrait of Sylvia Plath

Stephanie Hemphill

2007 * p. 248 * YA Poetry/Biography

Stephanie Hemphill tells the story of iconic poet Sylvia Plath through her own poetry. She writes the poems through the eyes of those who knew her: her mother, husband, numerous boyfriends, friends, therapists, associates, neighboors, etc.

It is really captivating. I must admit that I knew very little about Sylvia Plath. This verse portrait is really eye-opening and after you read it, you really feel like you know her through Hemphill's interesting and creative biographical approach.

Sylvia Plath was truly a unique woman. She was beautiful, popular, and brilliant. She was also boy-crazy, sexually repressed, self-harming, self-critical, eccentric, and depressed. Sylvia Plath committed suicide on February 11, 1963. It is a tragic, tragic story. But...really interesting.

Under most of the poems that chronologically tell Sylvia's life, there are brief, but more detailed explanations, facts, and quotes about her. (They really help explain and give the reader a break from so much poetry.) One I read was very interesting and I think really explains Sylvia's nature:

"The author Ronald Hayman asserts in his The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath that Nancy (Sylvia's friend and college roommate) felt that Sylvia sometimes counted on 'crises to give her creative inspiration,' and that 'for the sake of her poetry and her stories she [took] risks and [depended] on other people to rescue her from dangerous situations'" (93).

This novel is really unique. It is all poetry, but for a few clarifications and side notes, but it is easy to read and straightforward, with no guesswork. I really liked that Hemphill also wrote her poetry about Sylvia in the style of some of Sylvia's poems and connected them through the periods in her life. Really interesting.

-Reading level: grade 11 & up

-An emotional and serious read

-References to sex, promiscuity, drinking, smoking, suicide, adultery, self-harm

-A great segue into a study of Sylvia Plath's poetry