Our house rings to the resonant tones of the above and her husband. I heard some of these radio pieces on Radio 3 a few years back but now they are available from The British Library with a long interview with both poets which starts the CD. The content then moves from the cheerfully domestic through some harrowing and dark poems to a dramatic review of other Poet's work at the end. Plath has a voice which is obviously coloured by her years in the UK and has like TS Eliot, an accent that only slightly betrays her origins. I thought at some points I was detecting a catch in her voice which suggested severe distress which she was trying to control such as in Parliament Hill Fields but this may just be her way - it sometimes appears in the most cheerful of recollections of her home life. For those who have not heard or read any of Plath's poems, you may imagine them as dusty exercises with little relevance for the real world but to hear them read by the poet herself is a time-suspending experience. Occasional heavy floridness can be forgiven as the result of the distance between then and now, the transfer of original antique phrase into modern cliche and that strange accent more English than most of the English and yet still obviously not English carries the recital over these missteps.
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