A poetry review
Hi everyone. I've been reading, but not posting. I like what's been posted lately. There are some very different offerings from the standard fare.
It's a little strange for my first post in a while, but I wanted to share a poetry review I wrote a while back of Anne Sexton's 1969 collection "All My Pretty Ones." It's a little long, but I'm told it's hard to look away.
I hope you enjoy it.
The Good, The Bad, and All the Pretty Ones
There are few people who can look at the world and see consistently either a dark paradise of pleasure, pain and perdition, or a sub-Eden of endless wonders and gratitude. It is hard to find such persons because the world in fact exists in both realms, the light and the dark. The inherent beauty of life and order and prosperity is conjoined to its bastard twin, the seemingly endless cycle of suffering, death and calamity. If one could surgically separate these two halves of the world, the aura, the spiritual connection left between them would be the poetry of Anne Sexton. Her poetry is careful to never appear too cheerful, yet it can never fully condemn the heart’s need for gladness. There seems to be a desperate loathing for hope in her writing, yet the writing itself becomes redemption. Just as the separation of twins joined by birth cannot undo that certain duality unknown by those born alone, Anne Sexton seems to carefully choose which way to shift her weight as she sits on the fence.
The two-faced reality of living is a difficult burden for any of us to bear, but what drives us toward our conclusions is often unclear. This, of course, is what we have poets for. These lines from With Mercy For The Greedy define, at least for Sexton, the only ointment for the injuries of the world.
“This is what poems are:
With mercy
For the greedy,
They are the tongue’s wrangle,
The world’s pottage, the rat’s star.”
Her poetry is her confession of sin, her prayers of both petition and praise. The stanzas of her poems are the frontlines in her battle to choose a side. Sexton longs to touch the sweet, soft, white underbelly of the world, but consistently draws her hand back from the raised and prickling hairs on the back of the beast. She sees the wonders of the world, even acknowledges God, but as she writes, “need is not quite belief.”
In All My Pretty Ones, Sexton does seem at times to step over the edge, completely, into either the bliss of ignorance or the dead man’s walk of self-absorbed bitterness. Her poem, The Hangman, is a heartbreaking picture of disappointed motherhood, in which a child is stricken near death, only to live on, cruelly.
“Supplied
With air, against my guilty wish,
Your clogged pipes cried
Like Lazarus.”
Against her guilty wish. How many times have we wished for the beauty to die? How many times have we begged the eyes of the face of God to simply turn away? It is this kind of realism in Sexton’s poetry that does not anger or hurt her reader, because she will not take a side. Indeed, she is not without her moments of joy.
I Remember is one of the few poems in this collection which lingers for its whole duration on the beautiful. At least in this collection, it is a rare moment. All of her images are of satisfied adventure, not perfect, but just right.
“…one day I tied my hair back
with a ribbon and you said
that I looked almost like
a puritan lady and what
I remember best is that
the door to your room was
the door to mine.”
It is in the lines of these poems that one sees the spirit of a person torn in two. Sexton’s poems are exploratory, consolatory, and reconciliatory. She seems to be trying constantly to make even the numbers of an impossible equation. If ever wandering spirits, lost and confused souls could communicate their frustrations, perhaps they would find their clearest voice in the words of Sexton’s poems. As she writes in Flight of the streetlights which, “sucked in the insects who had nowhere else to go,” Sexton’s poetry seems to beckon the leftover auras of broken people to sit with her on the fence, in the hope that they will not have to chose a side after all, and perhaps instead there can be a middle place, a gathering of unhappy dreamers, all her pretty ones.
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