Plath wrote most of these poems in the months before her suicide in February 1963, sometimes several a day, possessed by a voice she had never quite found before. The poems are furious, precise, and terrifying: Lady Lazarus rising from the ash, Daddy the vampire, the bees that swarm through several poems. Ted Hughes edited the collection after her death, arranging and selecting, and controversy about his choices has never ended. The voice is unmistakable. The control is absolute, even in extremity. Dying is an art. Plath made it one.