Individual aspects of Sylvia Plath's visual art have been long identified as important elements in her overall artistic vision but this is the first time that a single volume has offered a comprehensive overview of Plath's visual imagination. And in its totality, what a substantial and lifelong feature of her work her visual art turns out to be.

The book has its origins in the Arts of Sylvia Plath project and the exhibition of Plath's art work at the seventieth birthday anniversary symposium at Indiana University, and this is reflected in the long opening essay by the exhibition organizer, Kathleen Connors, which makes three important points. Firstly, until her final years as a Smith student Plath thought it just as likely that a future life in art would be spent in drawing and painting as in poetry and prose. Secondly, and more prosaically, we have such a complete record of the evolution of Plath's art work because her mother kept absolutely everything. Thirdly, from Plath's earliest childhood, representations of the female dominate her sketches and her figurative work.

Such prolific evidence of female representation poses the inevitable question picked up by several of the other contributors: are the drawings of glamorous 1950s beauties, of mermaids and princesses, ironic critiques of an artificial construction of femininity revealing an early awareness of masquerade, or are they standard, unremarkable childhood drawings which, as Susan Gubar argues in the closing essay, are the result of an early idolatry of ideas of 1940s and 1950s womanhood, an idolatry which is overturned only in the poetry? In her essay, Sally Bayley supports the Gubar thesis, cleverly relating Plath's iconography of womanhood to the idealized model of suburban domestic architectures, and suggesting that Plath had a split-level version of womanhood. Such a reading contrasts the Disneyfied version of compliant, domesticated femininity in Plath's Snow White painting and Girl Scout self-portrait with the other “level” of such cross-examination poems as “Lesbos,” “Two Sisters of Persephone” and “The Tour.” On the politics of her girlhood art the jury in this book is divided, but there is little dispute about the continuity between the visual art and the writing, illustrated by Ted Hughes's revelation (not included here) that Plath used the same instrument for pen and ink drawings and for writing poetry. Connors makes clear how important colour is to Plath's writing, particularly in the later poems with their frequent blues and blacks supplanting the reds of poppies, tulips and roses. Connors is particularly good on the series of poems Plath wrote inspired by specific paintings by de Chirico, Klee and Rousseau. These ekphrastic poems (Fra Jinghua employs this term, taken from the Greek exercise of describing the scene before the eyes, to characterize a principle operating throughout Plath's poetry) are seen by several contributors as just as pivotal in Plath's development as the Yadoo poems, “The Moon and the Yew Tree,” or “Elm.” Offering her distinctive, dense psychoanalytic and historicized reading of culture, Christina Britzolakis associates Plath's formation as a poet with the moment when modernism became canonized, seeing parallels between the (doomed) quest to recover the lost father in poems such as “The Colossus” and “Daddy” and the distortion and fragmentation of statue figures in de Chirico's paintings. Diane Middlebrook's essay is a marvellous microcosm of Plath studies, combining as it does a Plath poem, its inspiration in the Hugh Robus sculpture Three Caryatids without a Portico, and the famous meeting of Plath and Hughes. Middlebrook highlighs the poetry battle which Plath unwittingly found herself drawn into when her poem “Three Caryatids” became caught in the crossfire of rival student magazines at Cambridge.

Eye Rhymes provides strong ammunition for those who have argued that Plath's primary subject is an interrogation of the construction of womanhood in the middle of the twentieth century, for even Langdon Hammer's reading of Plath's high-school war pictures, intriguingly related to the “child” in “Daddy” and the individual at war with herself in “Cut,” foregrounds gender. The selection of reproduced images in this lavishly illustrated book certainly endorses such a reading, and although there are limited examples of Plath's numerous pen-and-ink drawings of buildings and the scrapbook collages of consumer culture, Eye Rhymes provides an otherwise comprehensive documentary record of Plath's visual art, from childhood drawings and sketches of friends to the more experimental student work. Missing is a description of how art was taught in American high schools and colleges in the 1940s and 1950s, but overall Eye Rhymes contains important insights, not least Susan Gubar's closing observation that in Plath's self portraits the mouth is closed, whereas the poetry is full of mouths and mouthings. It is in the poetry that Plath came to speak.