[In the following review, Lockett delineates the defining characteristics of Sarton's verse in her Collected Poems (1930-1993).]

Even the most devout reader of May Sarton's work may be relatively unfamiliar with her poetry. But Sarton, who has published 16 volumes of verse to date, considers herself a poet first and foremost. Thus, Collected Poems (1930-1993) is essential reading.

The earliest poems, five of which appeared in the prestigious Poetry magazine when Sarton was only 17, already display the excellent command of form and technique that define her work. But it is with the publication of later collections that we see the poet at her peak, penning such classics as “Prisoner at a Desk,” “Now I Become Myself,” “In Time Like Air” (the collection of the same name received a National Book Award nomination), and “My Sisters, O My Sisters,” one of the many poems that address the struggle and fullness of life as a woman and a writer:

… And now we who are writing women and strange monsters
Still search our hearts to find the difficult answers,
To be through what we make more simply human,
To come to the deep place where poet becomes woman,
Where nothing has to be renounced or given over—
… And that great sanity, that sun, the feminine power.

Because Sarton is primarily a lyric poet—using sonnets, songs, villanelles, and other traditional forms at a time when free verse is all the rage—she has often been overlooked or attacked by critics. But Sarton's forte is in tooling the complex and compelling music and imagery that is characteristic of most poems that have stood the test of time. Similarly, the content of the poems always goes straight to the marrow of human experience whether she is writing about “Old Lovers at a Ballet,” domestic joy (“A Light Left On”), struggling with her mother's death (“Dream”), remembering Virginia Woolf (“Letter from Chicago”), or celebrating an unusual and fortunate relationship (“To an Honest Friend”). The strict form of many of the poems provides a sturdy framework for the often shocking revelations about the savagery behind the most apparently benign human gesture, the violent and destructive impulse that is often the springboard for creativity (see “Binding the Dragon”), and the “dark goddess” in all of us that demands to be served (“Invocation to Kali”).

The earliest collections precede the tradition of confessional poetry, whose most successful practitioners include Sexton and Plath, but which is often a weakness in the hands of less-skilled contemporary poets. Much of Sarton's work focuses on the external world—the rhythm of the seasons, the wonder of animals, history, and mythology. Even when she explores her interior terrain (one collection is, in fact, called Inner Landscape), it is in a way that remains accessible and useful to readers, affecting the deep subconscious of the audience as much as that of the writer. This is hard to do, and readers will find a good example of Sarton's skill in “Divorce of Lovers,” which propels us on an exhausting but finally enlightening exploration of the grief, denial, rage, pain, and acceptance that follow the end of a love affair. Sarton's is never a poetry of self-pity, never purely a poetry of self. Her poems display a European discipline married to an American energy and fervor. There is a transparence and transcendence to her work that invite us into the poet's mind, where we are surprised to find not just a window into her soul but a mirror reflecting ours.