If you’re new to Sylvia Plath, I would recommend reading her Collected Poems from back (minus the juvenilia tacked on to the end) to front.

Why? Besides Sylvia’s once-hub Ted Hughes’ weird decisions in arranging the poems in this book, Plath’s “greatest hits” — “Lady Lazarus,” “Daddy,” “The Applicant,” etc. — were written in the last two years of her life.

And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.

In fact her early poems are, um, pretty boring — mostly more formal, high-lyric poems (as in a description of some aspect of nature revealing some bigger truth about the world, human feeling, relationships), with many written from the point of view of some third party.

Sure, some of these poems sort of hint at the poems to come. Sylvia seems to favor things in nature that are the color of blood, for example — like poppies and berries. Still, these earlier poems live in contradistinction to the poems for which Sylvia’s become a legend — the ones that have popularized her as a “confessional” poet.

Dying
Is an art, like everything else,
I do it exceptionally well.

In general, Sylvia’s later poems — like “Lady Lazarus,” which talks about her three suicide attempts — seem much more biographical and personal than her earlier poems. Yes, there are a handful of bee-related poems in 1962 — but then her father was a bee specialist, and she wrote “Daddy” that year too:

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time –

How to related all of this back to shampoo:

Out of the Ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.