Sarton Selected: An Anthology of the Journals, Novels, and Poetry of May Sarton
This inspiriting collection gathers Sarton's zestful journals, fiction, essays on her craft, and the poetry--taut, formal and passionate--for which she is best known. Sarton, who will be 79 on publication daynifty! , writes of solitude, of ardent love and friendship, houses and gardens, painting and music, and the erotic act of art--as in her poems "The Consummation" and "The Lady and the Unicorn." Her animal poems are poignant, often making application to humans; in "Of Molluscs" lovers, too, are "shelled up in fears." Sarton explores age, sickness (in the novel A Reckoning ), even death as thresholds of deepening experience: the subjects of the poem "Old Lovers at the Ballet" find in themselves that "the soul is a lithe and serene athlete." The narrator of "My Father's Death" compares her bereavement to a ship's being "gently set free, / The landlocked, launched," and announces that she has "slipped out from the embracing shore"' into new life. Poems of grief include a brilliant sestina, "The Concentration Camps," with its unrelenting evocation of dead children's shoes. Westbrook College professor Daziel's gauche introduction dwells on Sarton's detractors, presuming the critical "fate of May Sarton" will be as a celebrant of "traditionally female values (e.g. nurture) as opposed to someone like Joseph Conrad"--a wildly inept equation, for Sarton offers universally humane reflections in a feast of words.Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.