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Rating: 
Summary: Sylvia Plath's first book; skillfully made word-sculptures
Review: "Hardcastle Crags" and "Point Shirley" are masterpieces. "Grantchester Meadows" shows a keen visual sense; "Man In Black," "Deer Island," and "Sow" display dexterity with slant-rhyme and terza rima. The poems are more formal than those found in "Ariel" and other posthumous books; but "The Colossus" does manage to remain quite vivid in the memory as a formidable achievement by a truly skilled poet, with a painterly eye, and an ear as good as any other midcentury poet.
Rating:
Summary: Sylvia Plath's first book; skillfully made word-sculptures
Review: "Hardcastle Crags" and "Point Shirley" are masterpieces. "Grantchester Meadows" shows a keen visual sense; "Man In Black," "Deer Island," and "Sow" display dexterity with slant-rhyme and terza rima. The poems are more formal than those found in "Ariel" and other posthumous books; but "The Colossus" does manage to remain quite vivid in the memory as a formidable achievement by a truly skilled poet, with a painterly eye, and an ear as good as any other midcentury poet.
Rating: 
Summary: A Great Collection of Poetry!!!!
Review: A Great Books for frans of poetry and Sylvia Plath. Best Poems are ones at the beggining and end of her literary career. This is the beggining and one of the best. If you like this, Also look at her last collection of poems, "Ariel" Thanx for your time!!!!!!
Rating:
Summary: A Great Collection of Poetry!!!!
Review: A Great Books for frans of poetry and Sylvia Plath. Best Poems are ones at the beggining and end of her literary career. This is the beggining and one of the best. If you like this, Also look at her last collection of poems, "Ariel" Thanx for your time!!!!!!
Rating:
Summary: stark and sublime, plath's hommage to her father.
Review: poetry is long becoming a lost art, plath keeps it alive with deep emotion and intense language. one could spend years reading this collection over and over.
Rating: 
Summary: Good But Falls Short
Review: Sylvia Plath was born in Boston in 1932. Her first book of poems was The Colossus. Though Sylvia Plath was a talented writer, The Colossus misses as often as it hits. The work is passionate but hectic, traveling the length and depth of feelings but not staying in one place long enough to make an impact. The poems manage to offer up emotion, but it is largely emotion unpolished and reads, in places, like a high school angst diary rather then the work of the talented poet.The result is a few diamonds of amazing caliber and lot of rock thrown in. And the diamonds are truly worth reading. Works such as Full Fathom Five are extremely powerful while others miss the mark entirely, such as Daddy which is a long discombobulated babble of a poem. It is unfortunate that so much of the work in this volume follows those lines. This is a book of a poet still searching for her voice, as so many first books are. At the end of the day this is a great book if you have already like Plath and want to read more of her work, even if it is second rate. However, if you haven't ever read her before, I suggest Ariel or Crossing the Water, both far more powerful works. There graphic images and unabashedly confessional nature, make much better poems.
Rating:
Summary: Achieving Harmony through Conflict: Plath's Word-Sculptures
Review: Sylvia Plath's initial volume of poetry is very much in the formalistic style that was prevalent in the 1950s, but she brings to verse-making a "diction that is galvanized against inertia" (to quote Marianne Moore in a different context), a heavily alliterative, percussive idiom in which we discern kinship to Dylan Thomas and Gerard Manley Hopkins. In "Hardcastle Crags," we have an analogue for a woman's heels against the pavement: "Flintlike, her feet struck / Such a racket of echoes." We have the slovenly slush of the tide at Point Shirley, where the poet's grandmother "kept house / Against what the sluttish, rutted sea could do." We have in other slant-rhymed terza-rima, and intricate stanza shapes reminiscent of Richard Wilbur and his lyric called "Beasts." And has anyone captured the somnolent wakefulness of "the chilly no-man's-land of five o'clock in the morning" better than Sylvia Plath in "The Ghost's Leavetaking"? There are poems about mushrooms, moles, and men in black. There is a homage to the artist Leonard Baskin, renowned as a maker of woodcuts. A keen visual sense in these poems leads us not to be surprised when we learn that Plath worked well as a painter of watercolours. Her second pre-posthumous volume, "Ariel," is perhaps more famous for its unselfsparing chronicle of a crashing marriage and of suicidal depression. Its fiercely unfettered cadences and controversial images attracted immediate attention, praise and opprobrium. But this reviewer feels that the poems of "Colossus" represent the superior achievement, possessing a technique and a sonic command surpassed by precious few poets of our age.
Rating:
Summary: Achieving Harmony through Conflict: Plath's Word-Sculptures
Review: Sylvia Plath's initial volume of poetry is very much in the formalistic style that was prevalent in the 1950s, but she brings to verse-making a "diction that is galvanized against inertia" (to quote Marianne Moore in a different context), a heavily alliterative, percussive idiom in which we discern kinship to Dylan Thomas and Gerard Manley Hopkins. In "Hardcastle Crags," we have an analogue for a woman's heels against the pavement: "Flintlike, her feet struck / Such a racket of echoes." We have the slovenly slush of the tide at Point Shirley, where the poet's grandmother "kept house / Against what the sluttish, rutted sea could do." We have in other slant-rhymed terza-rima, and intricate stanza shapes reminiscent of Richard Wilbur and his lyric called "Beasts." And has anyone captured the somnolent wakefulness of "the chilly no-man's-land of five o'clock in the morning" better than Sylvia Plath in "The Ghost's Leavetaking"? There are poems about mushrooms, moles, and men in black. There is a homage to the artist Leonard Baskin, renowned as a maker of woodcuts. A keen visual sense in these poems leads us not to be surprised when we learn that Plath worked well as a painter of watercolours. Her second pre-posthumous volume, "Ariel," is perhaps more famous for its unselfsparing chronicle of a crashing marriage and of suicidal depression. Its fiercely unfettered cadences and controversial images attracted immediate attention, praise and opprobrium. But this reviewer feels that the poems of "Colossus" represent the superior achievement, possessing a technique and a sonic command surpassed by precious few poets of our age.
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