The Colossus and Other Poems.

London: Heinemann, 1960. First edition of the first complete volume of poetry to be published by Plath and the only volume published in her lifetime. Octavo, original cloth. Near fine in a near fine dust jacket. Housed in a custom half morocco slipcase. An exceptional example. With this startling, exhilarating book of poems, which was first published in 1960, Sylvia Plath burst into literature with spectacular force. In such classics as "The Beekeeper's Daughter," "The Disquieting Muses," "I Want, I Want," and "Full Fathom Five," she writes about sows and skeletons, fathers and suicides, about the noisy imperatives of life and the chilly hunger for death. Graceful in their craftsmanship, wonderfully original in their imagery, and presenting layer after layer of meaning, the forty poems in The Colossus are early artifacts of genius that still possess the power to move, delight, and shock. "[Her poems] have that exquisite, heart-breaking quality about them that has made Sylvia Plath our acknowledged Queen of Sorrows, the spokeswoman for our most private, most helpless nightmares. . . . Her poetry is as deathly as it is impeccable; it enchants us almost as powerfully as it must have enchanted her" (Joyce Carol Oates).