Learning on ScreenSylvia Plath
2010. BBC / British Library. Audio (CD). Running time: 73 minutes. ISBN: 978-0712351027. Price: £10.16
About the author: Professor Suzie Hanna is Chair of Animation Education at Norwich University College of the Arts and director The Girl Who Would Be God a short animation based on the teenaged journal of Sylvia Plath. She is also a contributor to the forthcoming Cambridge University Press publication Representing Sylvia Plath, edited by Tracy Brain and Sally Bayley. www.suziehanna.com
Leading Plath academic, author and archivist Peter K Steinberg has written a very full, thorough introduction to this excellent collection of audio recordings, giving an in depth and lyrical context for consideration of the CD’s content, commenting that ‘the recordings on this CD will add another dimension to our understanding of Sylvia Plath that must be incorporated into our collective memory’.
The compilation is a major Plath publication; it includes previously unreleased material as well as digitally re-mastered recordings of the voices of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes taken from the BBC and the British Library archives. This is a valuable new resource with great potential use for educators and students at any level, with relevance to a range of studies including American and English literature, journalism, history, drama, media, visual arts and broadcast performance. It provides an intensely thrilling new experience for those who have a serious interest in the work and lives of Plath and Hughes.
It is a particular pleasure to hear Plath compare and review the work of other poets as well as hearing performances of her own poetry with such syllabic clarity. There are twenty-three audio tracks including Plath’s inimitable super-articulate analysis of ‘the new spirit at work in American poetry’ in 1963 where she recommends that we ‘flip through Lowell’s early poems, as fine and wild and rich and stiff as the Animal Room at the Vatican’; and amongst over a dozen poems, there is a live recording of her reading of ‘Tulips’ at the Mermaid Theatre in 1961 and a seamless, almost hypnotic performance of ‘Mushrooms’.
