Collected Poems, 1930-1993 (Magill Book Reviews)

May Sarton’s Collected Poems, 1930-1993 is a stunning testament to the poet’s writing career. Containing close to three hundred poems, the volume explores Sarton’s lifelong themes: love and the vicissitudes of passion, the need for solitude and work, the art of poetry and the search for order it embodies, the psychological struggles of the solitary, and the necessary restoration of the self. Drawing images and metaphors primarily from nature, the poet’s travels, and the landscape around her Maine home, Sarton’s poems are highly accessible and invite the reader to share her emotional and spiritual experiences. An adroit metrist, Sarton writes most often in rhymed verse and traditional forms: heroic couplets, iambic pentameter quatrains, Sicilian tercets, the ballad, and, in several instances, the villanelle. Yet in her free verse, found in many of her travel poems, Sarton illustrates her ease with more open forms.

Sarton’s eye for singular domestic and everyday details characterizes her writing, both her poetry and her memoirs. While she occasionally writes of national matters, a more personal range of subjects—the rape of the earth necessary to locate a new well; seeping cold in an old house; the soft glance of a lover, reading a book; the rich seasonal colors and flowers in her garden or nearby woods; the death of a favorite cat, an emblem of wilderness—form the core of Sarton’s poetic interests and testify to the importance of observation and awareness to a worthwhile life. The reader who seeks a poetic guidebook to a rich solitary life spanning most of the twentieth century will find these Collected Poems, 1930-1993 an important and rewarding volume.

Bibliography

Hunting, Constance, ed. May Sarton: Woman and Poet. Orono: National Poetry Foundation, University of Maine at Orono, 1982. This first book-length critical discussion of Sarton’s works remains an important collection of essays. Includes Hunting’s “The Risk Is Very Great: The Poetry of May Sarton.”

Kallet, Marilyn, ed. A House of Gathering: Poets on May Sarton. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993. This indispensable collection of essays presents contemporary poets writing about Sarton’s poetry. The essays cover a broad range of topics, both specific and general. They show the influences on her work and the influence of her own work, and they help place Sarton within the tradition of American literature. The collection also includes a chronology of important events in Sarton’s life and a bibliography.

Sarton, May. Writings on Writing. Orono, Maine: Puckerbrush Press, 1980. Sarton writes candidly about her attitudes toward her literary production, including poetry, the genre that she finds most inspiring.

Schwartzlander, Susan, and Marilyn R. Mumford, eds. That Great Sanity: Critical Essays on May Sarton. Ann Arbor: University Press of Michigan, 1992. Offers twelve essays on Sarton, including one specifically on her poetry, “May Sarton’s Lyric Strategy.”