Crossing the Water consists of poems written in 1960 and 1961, after The Colossus was published but before her final intense period of creation. It's important to stress that they are not Ariel left-overs, but poems of the brief interregnum between her strange precocity and full maturity…. Crossing the Water is full of perfectly realised works. Its most striking impression is of a front-rank artist in the process of discovering her true power. Such is Plath's control that the book possesses a singularity and certainty which should make it as celebrated as The Colossus or Ariel. Once more death has all the best parts, but his disguises and metamorphoses are doubly audacious. (p. 774)

In this period of Plath's poetry, objects come towards the reader like frightening Greek messengers. The gifts are not even ambiguous; they are seen wearing their proud colours of destruction. The language is that carefully judged half-formal...