Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Winter Trees
    Unavailable
    Winter Trees
    Unavailable
    Winter Trees
    Ebook60 pages31 minutes

    Winter Trees

    By Beverly Barton

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    "Nearly all the poems here have the familiar Plath daring, the same feel of bits of frightened, vibrant, indignant consciousness translated instantly into words and images that blend close, experienced horror and icy, sardonic control." — New Statesman

    "A book that anyone seriously interested in poetry now must have . . . Sylvia Plath’s immense gift is evident throughout."— Guardian

    The poems in Winter Trees, published posthumously in 1972, form part of the collection from which the Ariel poems were chosen.


    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateNov 15, 2016
    ISBN9780062669476
    Unavailable
    Winter Trees
    Author

    Beverly Barton

    I'm a sixth generation Alabamian who writes mainstream romantic suspense for Kensington. I'm also a wife, mother and grandmother. People who know me well will tell you that my family is more important to me than anything in the world. I'm fortunate to have a cousin who is like a sister to me and am blessed with a handful of close friends, whom I refer to as my bosom buddies. I wouldn't know what to do without these great gals who give me encouragement, support, advice, love and lots of laughs. I was born in Alabama, where my parents lived on my paternal grandmother's ancestral home place, a farm that is still owned by a member of the family. My upbringing was divided between Tuscumbia & Barton, Alabama and Chattanooga, Tennessee. I graduated high school from Chattanooga Central and then attended college at the University of North Alabama. I married young and traveled briefly with my husband, who served in the navy in the mid-to-late sixties. After my husband decided against a military career, we settled back in our home state of Alabama and started a family. First a daughter and then a son. I was "in my element" as a stay-at-home mother and I can truthfully say that I've loved every moment of motherhood. I enjoyed my children as babies, as toddlers, grade-schoolers, teenagers and now as adults. Our children are both grown and out of college, with successful lives and good marriages. I always wanted four children and when my two kids married fabulous people, I finally got that second daughter and son. We have two young grandsons, who have brought tremendous joy into our growing-older world, and just this year, we were blessed with the birth of a beautiful granddaughter. I sold my fist book in 1989 and it was released as a July 1990 Silhouette Desire. Yankee Lover was set in my hometown of Tuscumbia, Alabama, during the annual Helen Keller Festival. Since that first sale, I've written over sixty books for Silhouette and Kensington. My first mainstream romantic suspense, After Dark, was released in December 2000 under the Zebra imprint for Kensington. In the past seventeen years, I've gone from being one of the "new kids on the block" to one of the "old pros."

    Read more from Beverly Barton

    Related to Winter Trees

    Related ebooks

    Poetry For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      How Instagram Saved Poetry

      Oct 15, 2018

      How Instagram Saved Poetry
      6 min read

    • Article

      A Mad Woman on Fire: On Sylvia Plath and Female Rage

      Jul 12, 2018

      “You do not do, you do not do / Any more, black shoe…” The poet’s voice is strong, piercing. Her tone arch, sly. A few lines later, as she proclaims, “Daddy, I have had to kill you,” she sounds like she’s about to burble into a mean, delicious laugh.

      5 min read

    • Article

      TEN POEMS Translations of Rafael Alberti

      May 1, 2024

      Throughout the centuries,through the nothingness of the world,I, without sleep, search for you. Behind me, imperceptible,without touching my shoulders,my dead angel keeps watch. Where is Paradise,Shadow, you who have been there?I ask silently. Cities

      3 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Jan 1, 2020

      How slow is all of this dying? Across the county linea fossil in the making, off-road exhaling last lightin nightmud. A small cat in a steel trap. Pendulous sparrows preen. Holding on for the last bluedark nightwe ate fruited scabs off each other’s m

      4 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems by Phillip B. Williams

      Dec 15, 2017

      The masters are yet dead. Wanting to be human,I tried to rewrite The Waste Land. The canon’s reachcasts ruinous light. The masters’ pens breachthis page where, above, my own hand spectates. Babylonrisen, exorcism in reverse, whose nature upended now?

      6 min read

    • Article

      Diaspora Sonnets

      Sep 1, 2022

      The old men drink their spritzers and gossipunder awnings. Red hued and blustery, like two roosters on the side of a road.Skyward they crane their necks and laugh, sometimes they wonder about kings and future kingsand how the muscles peer from their

      2 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems by G. C. Waldrep

      Dec 15, 2018

      Morwenstow You stow them to the rear of worship: bits of jagged iron,candle nubs, miscellaneous gears and levers, each perfectunto itself but useless apart from its fellows. The humanback is meant to bear this weight: cable spools, dustyvases. Here i

      2 min read

    • Article

      from BLACK PASTORAL

      Nov 1, 2023

      somewheres, some lifetimes ago I have run so far, so long.There is nowhere I haven’t beenBut here, in this field, a bodyLength from the ragged brinkThat gives way to forest.I collapsed here, the thin, hard slipOf me whittled at both ends.I want badly

      4 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Nov 1, 2021

      That the semi-circular canal is part of my ear,not a style of Venetian waterway arch,I learned mid-air on a Huffy.That bicycles left long out in the rain split.That prepositions are tricky.That I was made part industrious,part lazy-assed. That descri

      3 min read

    • Article

      Eight Poems

      Sep 1, 2019

      The wind in swells through the wild rye rolls.The bright sky dulls. Over the hills,Their green backs ringed with blue-Bells sunset-rung, flaps a wingy shadow west-Ward. A jay. Poor bird that no netMet nor gin it didn’t love. Good luck,You luckless sc

      3 min read

    • Article

      AUSTRALOPITHECA1 & STARMAN2

      Sep 1, 2019

      The countdown to you begyns with me, deere Starman, when I wander, dumbly, deep into a space hospittable to Hunger. Now, all’s desert. No milk in syte. Just pitifull sand, what shushes as it slydes through your hande to rejoin itself. I’d join myself

      7 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Mar 1, 2020

      All the animals you knowwill die. You set foodout for them anyway,let the oily seeds fallamong the fiddleheadsto be ground downpermanent as bone.The forest fills and unfills,drops itself down roottubes and turns to dark lace.One undoing: leafto sparr

      1 min read

    • Article

      Seven Poems

      May 1, 2022

      Seven Poems
      2 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      May 1, 2023

      Let’s be GodFor a moment, Shall we?That which invites Composition,That which is suspended From a great height,The presence Of approximationHeavy in the meadows, I’m not afraid,And yet My shroud vanishesIn these lines, I am so weptPast weeping, And wh

      1 min read

    • Article

      In The Ruins Of Paradise

      Dec 17, 2018

      In The Ruins Of Paradise
      18 min read

    • Article

      The Notebook

      Dec 7, 2021

      As a child, my hand closed over a centipede,There was a penny in my mouth, and becauseYou are everyone in the dream, evenNonpersons, I was the badly scarredFlowering cherry and the moving shadowsOf its branches on the brick façade behind it.Artificia

      2 min read

    • Article

      Must-Read Poetry: September 2017

      Sep 11, 2017

      Isn’t that one of the purest goals of poetry—to justify our breaths? To recognize that we matter? The post Must-Read Poetry: September 2017 appeared first on The Millions.

      8 min read

    • Article

      Cricket League

      Feb 1, 2019

      Saanvi Chari, age 8 Avon, OH Did I really just notice this? Each side of All the flowers In the front Look the same. All of the roses, dandelions, And lavenders, and leaves. I noticed this today While I was walking down The driveway To take the garba

      4 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      Jun 3, 2024

      Driving south, I cross it—the intangible line beyond which bougainvillea grows, beyond which the land is flagrant. It’s not exact; there is no sign as with a border, so everybody knows. It doesn’t waft to me; it’s not even fragrant. When I see the bu

      3 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      Sep 1, 2022

      I whooshedthrough the party. I grewa set of invisible hands. I was flower girlto the Commonwealth where lovers danced a dancecalled the snowdrift. Sugar mapleshelicoptered samarasin my glass. The dogs slackenedin their webs of shade. A democracyof cl

      2 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      May 1, 2022

      —after Gerrit van Honthorst’s “Samson and Delilah,” c. 1621 They’ve made a monster of me, marring my namefor eternity. I’m not Delilah,but Laila. I loved him. Each night, in bed, after our bodies became one body, he would succumb to sleep, resting hi

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Epic Of Gilgamesh

      Jan 1, 2020

      My friends, who can reach heaven? The monster bellows like a river swollen with flood.Many are consumed in his fiery breath. My friends, who can reach heaven? Let us ask the mountain for a sign.Let us cut the spirits from the cedars. My friends, who

      3 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Nov 1, 2020

      The American linden sways nonplussed by the storm,a bounce here, a shimmy there, just shaking like musicleft over from the night’s end wafting into the avenues before sleep.I remember once walking down Clinton Street, and singingthat line returning,

      4 min read

    • Article

      Home

      Feb 25, 2019

      I once lived in a yellow little house. Each morning, birds convened and sang at my bedroom window. The gate was indigo and inside the garden all kinds of flowers rose to kiss the sunny walls. The yellow nest was filled with cherished books, colourful

      5 min read

    • Article

      Six Poems

      Feb 28, 2023

      Dear C, At first Virgil’s poem is quite dull; equivocalnames of products at The Container Store: Elfa White Medium Drawer, Mesh NarrowRolling Cart (Medium Solution), Narrow Classic Mesh Box and the number of pirouetting starseach product attained. An

      5 min read

    • Article

      Must-Read Poetry: April 2018

      Apr 3, 2018

      Here are seven notable books of poetry publishing in April. Eye Level by Jenny Xie An excellent debut. Xie is particularly gifted with precise description; I want to linger on these poems. “Phnom Penh Diptych: Wet Season” is masterful and patient, ex

      6 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Jul 1, 2020

      Beneath your skin, a floodof glass is surfacing. It means I stayalone for years during your weekin the hospital. You breathe like rosehips crushed, mouth too muddy to believe. I’m one to talk.The stylist asks if I want my liesto show through. I wade

      2 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Winter Trees

    4/5

    62 ratings2 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 2/5
      I wanted to like this more than I did. There were snippets and sections I enjoyed, and a couple of poems stood out. But as a whole piece, it does seem like the leftovers were shoved together.

      The poems were generally too abstract for my tastes, but that seems consistent with her illness.

      After looking through some of her more famous poems, I wouldn't recommend starting with this collection. It wasn't bad, I just don't think it's her best work.

      "There are the clothes of a fat woman I do not know.
      There is my comb and brush. There is an emptiness.
      I am so vulnerable suddenly.
      I am a wound walking out of hospital.
      I am a wound they are letting go.
      I leave my health behind. I leave someone
      Who would adhere to me: I undo her fingers like bandages: I go."
    • 5/5
      Winter Trees is the last collection of Plath's poems, written in the last months of her life and while many were printed in various magazines previously, some were published here for the first time. Oddly enough, it's my first collection of Plath poetry -- I've read her prose before and some of her poems here and there but never a full collection before this one. I enjoyed that she doesn't use standard rhyme and meter here but is pretty much free form. Her poems are dark but also witty at times, and my favorite poems from this collection were "For a Fatherless Son" and "Child."Also published here is a radio play Three Women written for and produced by the BBC. It is Plath's first and only piece of dramatic writing. Billed as "a poem for three voices," this is a play more in the style of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood than Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire (i.e., it is more about the flowery language and spoken word than about having a three- or five-act plot complete with climax, denouement, etc.). The play takes place in a maternity ward, with the first voice belonging to a happily pregnant woman going into labor, the second voice to a woman experiencing yet another miscarriage, and the third voice to an unhappily pregnant woman going into labor. The juxtaposition of the three scenarios is particularly effective, more emotive, I think, than if the three stories were told separately. I was particularly taken by the sorrow of the second voice, such as when she says:I am not ugly. I am even beautiful. The mirror gives back a woman without deformity.The nurses give back my clothes, and an identity.It is usual, they say, for such a thing to happen.It is usual in my life, and the lives of others.I am one in five, something like that. I am not hopeless.I am beautiful as a statistic. Here is my lipstick.I draw on the old mouth. The red mouth I put by with my identityA day ago, two days ago, three days ago. It was a Friday.I do not even need a holiday; I can go to work today.I can love my husband, who will understand.Who will love me through the blur of my deformityAs if I had lost an eye, a leg, a tongue....I am myself again. There are no loose ends.I am bled white as wax, I have no attachments. I am flat and virginal, which means nothing has happened,Nothing that cannot be erased, ripped up and scrapped, begun again.These little black twigs do not think to bud,Nor do these dry, dry gutters dream of rain....It it I. It is I --Tasting the bitterness between my teeth.The incalculable malice of the everyday.How haunting. And I absolutely love that final line, which seems so appropriate for any host of disappointments.All and all, this slim collection is a great primer of Plath’s works and I’d recommend for anyone with an interest in poetry.