Day 145

I went to the Poetry Library yesterday (Olivia laughed at me when I told her this then covered herself by saying that I was "just cute". In my defence, all the museums, art galleries and iconic libraries I have visited have been so inspiring and are places that can't be found in Toronto). But anyways, the library is right beside the London Eye and Big Ben


and is home to 100,000 books of poetry, some dating all the way back to 1912. I wanted to go there to read the collection of Sylvia Plath. My English/Creative Writing teacher gifted me Wintering, a novel of Sylvia Plath after I won the creative writing award when I graduated last year. The book explores the weeks after Sylvia moved to London with her children, following the breakdown of her marriage with Ted Hughes. It was during this time she wrote Ariel (her last collection of poems before she committed suicide) and the author weaves the poems from this collection throughout the novel. I'm in the middle of reading it now and has made me appreciate Sylvia Plath's writing much more than I did before. I am beginning to read her poetry in a different way and I think this is because Wintering does such a good job at portraying who she was as a person, making her poetry even more personal than it was before. Although her poems have always echoed pain, this pain seems even more real to me knowing what she was going through when she wrote it.

The light this evening was so beautiful! Little Ava putting on her pyjamas: