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Summary: A stunning collection
Review: All of Anne Sexton's books of poetry, by themselves, are very powerful works. From "To Bedlam and Part Way Back," which deals with near-madness and various other things (hence the title) to "The Awful Rowing Toward God," which is a moving account of Anne's struggles with spirituality, not to mention all the posthumously published works that are included, The Complete Poems shows, the progression of Anne's life and in a way tells the whole story, even though, being poems, it's impossible to know everything.
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Summary: Mad girl to the microphone.
Review: All of Anne Sexton's work combined in one emotion-filled book. It is hard to put down once you start. Not only is Anne Sexton's work creative and well designed, but her naked honesty on sensitive subjects is revealed. Here, we find a bride and mother holding her head up and shouting to the world who she is, why she is that way, and how no one can pull her down. This is one collection that won't sit on a shelf and collect dust.
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Summary: one of our important confessional poets
Review: Anne Sexton has secured her place as one of our most important confessional poets (though I prefer Plath and Lowell over her work) and an important feminist poet. Her poems are polished, but still give that feeling of rawness. It's a good combination. Her later work is rather weak, but the work from her early and middle periods is excellent.
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Summary: Skewed and blunt-- not for the weak of heart
Review: Anne Sexton takes amazing views in her poetry. I don't think I have read many poems that present subjects in such blunt and obscure ways. The one section of this book that I found most enjoyment in was the transformation poems. I had never before thought in that particular view, seeing my beloved characters take on different and unusual personalities. The collection of transformation poems allows the reader to look at our everyday fairytales in new, exciting, and bizarre ways. Her poems like "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" and "Sleeping Beauty" bring the happily ever after versions to a sudden halt or she steers them into a completely skewed scheme of thought. These poems caused me to think of all my favorite tales and catch the small details that remain hidden or to see the hidden story below the main plot. Her poetry has inspired some of my own writings and I do encourage anyone who is interested in poetry to look into Sexton. Her unique styles and images can bring forth new ideas and perspectives that many readers can over look. This book presents her blunt voice and unique imagery as well as one could hope for. I enjoy reading poets who can be direct and tell it like it is, not beat around the bush with fancy language. Sexton's voice is beautifully written in her poems; she has many strong words to say and share. Its easy to hear her passions and her stories of life, living in reality rather than in a land far, far away. There are many sections of poetry in this book, my favorite of course being the transformations. Her language is easy to understand, sometimes harsh, yet necessary. She also tells many narratives, depicting the lives of those around her and of ones far away. I admire Sexton's poems more than I do most others. I myself wish that I had her ability to write with such a creative and direct style. She conveys so much emotion and power through a few lines. I can only imagine what it was like to live with such vigor! Her confessional poems make truth-telling an art. She holds back nothing, provoking the conservativeness out of us and making us look at our own naked selves in ways we have feared to before so we couldn't see the consequences or find out the darkest truths about ourselves. Her images are vivid and bring the poems to life inside our minds. It would be a shame to study poetry and not pick up this book. Sexton gives so much to the poetic world through her honest creativity and imagination that its hard to try to write confessional poems without knowing her. I recommend this book of brilliant poems for anyone's repertoire.
Rating:
Summary: Skewed and blunt-- not for the weak of heart
Review: Anne Sexton takes amazing views in her poetry. I don't think I have read many poems that present subjects in such blunt and obscure ways. The one section of this book that I found most enjoyment in was the transformation poems. I had never before thought in that particular view, seeing my beloved characters take on different and unusual personalities. The collection of transformation poems allows the reader to look at our everyday fairytales in new, exciting, and bizarre ways. Her poems like "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" and "Sleeping Beauty" bring the happily ever after versions to a sudden halt or she steers them into a completely skewed scheme of thought. These poems caused me to think of all my favorite tales and catch the small details that remain hidden or to see the hidden story below the main plot. Her poetry has inspired some of my own writings and I do encourage anyone who is interested in poetry to look into Sexton. Her unique styles and images can bring forth new ideas and perspectives that many readers can over look. This book presents her blunt voice and unique imagery as well as one could hope for. I enjoy reading poets who can be direct and tell it like it is, not beat around the bush with fancy language. Sexton's voice is beautifully written in her poems; she has many strong words to say and share. Its easy to hear her passions and her stories of life, living in reality rather than in a land far, far away. There are many sections of poetry in this book, my favorite of course being the transformations. Her language is easy to understand, sometimes harsh, yet necessary. She also tells many narratives, depicting the lives of those around her and of ones far away. I admire Sexton's poems more than I do most others. I myself wish that I had her ability to write with such a creative and direct style. She conveys so much emotion and power through a few lines. I can only imagine what it was like to live with such vigor! Her confessional poems make truth-telling an art. She holds back nothing, provoking the conservativeness out of us and making us look at our own naked selves in ways we have feared to before so we couldn't see the consequences or find out the darkest truths about ourselves. Her images are vivid and bring the poems to life inside our minds. It would be a shame to study poetry and not pick up this book. Sexton gives so much to the poetic world through her honest creativity and imagination that its hard to try to write confessional poems without knowing her. I recommend this book of brilliant poems for anyone's repertoire.
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Summary: Sexton a Gender Specific Voice
Review: Anne Sexton was an incredible poet her work is powerful, mesmerizing and thought provoking. Qualities that I definitely look for in great poetry and work that both genders can appreciate. But, part of what makes Sexton's poetry so powerful is the context under which it was written. She wrote deeply p personal poetry about women, about herself. About anger. About female anger. That is part of the reason her voice is so powerful she and Sylvia Plath were two women in the mid 20th century who were allowed to be angry, who reveled in their anger and claimed it. Her poems are not about abstract ideas, about Grecian Urns, but many of them about her personal experience as a woman, a wife a daughter. And people bought this. That was amazing, when you think about the roles of women at that time. Her collected work is interesting not only as great poetry but also as an amazing commentary about the status of women of her generation
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Summary: Deeply moving
Review: I began to read Anne Sexton's poerty in High School after a teacher saw that I was uninterested in the easy poetry my fellow classmates were reading. I fell totally in love with Anne Sexton's poems. The beauty and the truth. They are explicet, moving and so truthful that one who has been depressed can identify with her, automaticly. The poem I like the best is 'Anna who was mad.' There is a very haunting quality to this particular piece.I am sad to see that there are so few reviews for Sexton's work. I hope someday she will come to be embraced by a wide scale audience.
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Summary: So moving and full of life ----and death.Beautiful poems.
Review: This book is truly wonderful, so rich, the imagry so acurate, the poems are funny, sad, powerful, angry, satirical - her best lines - "A Writer IS Esentially a Spy" - are as was Anais Nin's works- a spy in the house of life, not just love. Her fairy tales, especially Briar Rose, are worth the price of the book itself. From a possessed witch, to an 8 year old sitting quietly watching unsure Protestants try to sing at Easter, to a year of being insane, or to a woman searching endlessly for Mercy Street (one of my favorites) and never finding it - this is one of the best books of confessional or any other kind of poetry I have ever read. Thank you so much, Anne!!
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Summary: Sexon's Work Is Both Gritty and Incandescent
Review: To read the poetry of Anne Sexton is to drown in the moment between sleeping and waking. Although Sexton's poems range in tone from gritty to incandescent, her content is consistently sharp, insightful, and stinging. She's one of those rare talents who manages to write with a purpose AND a passion. The first time I read her work, the thought that sprang to mind was: "Wow. She's writing what everyone else is only thinking." Sexton has a great capacity to verbalize the unspeakable, and she does it in such a way that it scars you and heals you simultaneously. Take, for example, her "Transformations" series (the re-written fairy tales.) Here we have incest, beauty, fear, love, repression, magic...all tangled between translucent words with spines of steel. To say I am in awe of this book is to only scratch the surface.
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Summary: Poetry as Therapy
Review: What first drew me to the poet Anne Sexton was a fragment I read from an essay in which she discussed the death of fellow American poet Sylvia Plath. What struck me was not just the disarming honesty of Sexton's remorse, but also the glimmer of a slightly less generous sentiment that belied her sadness. The precise nature of this sentiment became evident to me once I read Sexton's poem "Sylvia's Death," which revealed that Sexton's grief stemmed more from a profound sense of being left behind than from a sense of losing someone dear. In the poem, which is heartrending in its sincerity, Sexton mournfully addresses Plath: "Thief -- / how did you crawl into, / crawl down alone / into the death I wanted so badly and for so long, / the death we said we both outgrew, / the one we wore on our skinny breasts." What this passage and the entirety of her poem "Wanting to Die" reveal is just how clearly Sexton was aware of this death wish, this "suicide," as not only a disease of the mind, but a hunger -- an inexplicable and ever-present craving for permanent closure to consciousness. The overwhelming tone of "Sylvia's Death" is one of a woman who feels cheated out of something rightfully hers. Indeed, for Sexton, suicide was an inevitability -- she lived out her existence always with the awareness that she would end it by her own hand -- and many of the poems that made her name were a reflection of this very way of being. For those who deal with clinical depression as a way of life, the truth of the pain that rings from Sexton's verse is almost refreshing, and, in a sad sort of way, therapeutic.
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