Crossing The Water is an extraordinary book, not promising merely nor dazzling as one might have expected of a poet who was later to write the poems in Ariel, but perfectly satisfying in the way that only major poetry can be. That her achievement here may be spoken of in terms more orthodox than one could legitimately apply to Ariel is but one of the facts the promoters of the legend will have to deal with—how distressing it must be, for some of them at least, to confront a Plath largely in control even of her most terrible associations, and deliberately fashioning a voice by working through the poetry of Stevens, Frost, Lowell, Roethke, and others. The figure of the demon-lady with red hair eating men, and everything else, "like air," is considerably attenuated in the perspective of this new volume. Though one was always grateful for the dozen or so magnificent poems in Ariel, one may now be grateful that they can be read in a broader perspective wherein we shall more resolutely attend to the poems themselves rather than to the figure of the poet haunting the margins.
The items included in Crossing The Water were written, or so at least the dust-jacket of the volume informs us, "in the period between the publication of The Colossus (1960) and the posthumous book Ariel (published in England in 1965)." A number had appeared in periodicals before the poet took her life in 1963, but very few writers and critics had taken notice of them in discussing her career. It was as if, with Ariel, one had all one needed to reach some proper estimation of the poet…. We see clearly now that Ariel was by no means enough, that we wanted some assurance of substantiality and permanence in our impression of such poems as "Tulips," "Lady Lazarus," and "Daddy." Already too many of us had come to think of these poems we have so often read aloud and heard recited to us as instances in some peculiar event we had lived through and wondered over, but which seemed more and more remote from conventional poetic experience. In part, of course, it is the propensity of our youth and literary cultures to convert disturbed people into heroes that was responsible, but the Ariel poems themselves had no small hand in encouraging us to think of them as extraordinary primal events without antecedent or analogue. Crossing The Water may be discussed less feverishly, and one does not hesitate to describe it as a book with a number of great poems, a number of less ambitious but beautifully realized poems, and several immature pieces each of which calls to mind a particular poetic voice imperfectly assimilated.
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