This is such a depressing book: jagged and unlovely. I enjoy dark writing, but I tend to prefer it with some beauty in the language and I find beauty in short supply here. I suppose that's fair enough: it's easier for ugly things to be confronting and if a single word was used to describe this collection that might be it. Poems like "Daddy", for instance... it's the vicious honesty of the work rather than the words themselves that speaks to so many I think. As such Ariel is not really a book to like - at least for me - so the Goodreads rating system falls down a little because with the odd exception I don't actually like these poems, but I do find them strong and memorable, razor sharp in their perception of self. They're poems to admire, rather than to like; poems that arouse an odd mixture of compassion and distaste. The major exception happens to be one of my very favourite poems, "The Night Dances", which is included in here and which I love both for the language (one of the few Ariel poems I find truly lovely) and for the unflinchingly grim perspective on life: "The comets / Have such a space to cross, / Such coldness, forgetfulness. / So your gestures flake off -".