SOURCE: "One for Life, One for Death," in The New York Times Book Review, November 19, 1972, pp. 7, 14.

Oates is a prolific American educator, author, and critic. In the review below, she compares Up Country to Sylvia Plath's Winter Trees, remarking on the similarities and differences between the poets' writings and concluding that "one book affirms life; the other affirms death."

Read together, these two excellent books cause us to ask ourselves one of the riddles of life: Why is the experience of one human being so vastly different from that of another? Why, in two sensitive, intelligent, gifted women poets should the energies of art be so differently employed? Where one discovers in nature a "presence" of "something else that went before" (Kumin in "The Presence"), the other discovers a helpless "blue dissolve" and shadows "chanting, but easing nothing" (Plath in "Winter Trees"). Where one does not shy away...