[In the following review, Earnshaw lauds the thematic richness and stylistic mastery of the poems in Halfway to Silence.]

The eminent poet, novelist, and journal writer May Sarton, at eighty, has fashioned a moving series of poems [Halfway to Silence] chosen from her last three books. The three sections present three periods in her life: a love affair when she was sixty-five, a surge of creativity at age seventy, and a new awareness of herself as an artist. She gives this information in an author's note, along with the observation that “the lyric impulse infrequently lasts into old age.” We can only marvel at the vitality in these poems and think of portraits of other poets in old age: James Russell Lowell, Victor Hugo, and Robert Frost—the last, like Sarton, a New Hampshire resident. The poems reveal her secrets of survival: a deep kinship with nature, vigilant discipline, cool intelligence, and a heart open to love.

Supporting the thematic richness, Sarton's technical mastery gives strength in meter, euphony, sentence, and line. These elements are at their most obvious perhaps in “The Balcony,” based on Baudelaire's poem of that title. Sarton uses a ten-beat line to the French poet's twelve, but her lines are as regular as his, giving the desired stiff tableau effect. First lines are repeated at each stanza's end. The poem is an incantation, a hymn spoken to her lover in memory. Other poems such as “Salt Lick,” “Aids,” “The Phoenix Again” deepen meaning with the play of counterpoint rhythms, rhymes, and the sudden shift into plain speech. Technical sureness provides confidence and poise to the thoughts.

Each poem balances between narrative and meditation. Several poems recount the author's ecstasy in the presence of animals, wild or domestic; “Moose,” about wildness and joy; “Wilderness Lost,” a lament for her cat Bramble. Two poems speak of her mother: “Dream,” of her mother's death; “August Third,” with a humorous self-parody, “Old camel getting to her knees.” The poems in parts 1 and 2 speak of love won and lost: the thrill of a voice, hope for enduring love, jealousy, and the return to solitude.

My favorites are the philosophical poems in which the cool mind looking at life arrives at peace and wisdom. Sarton writes of art, the art of living, and of love. In “The Skilled Man” she tells us how a poem is done. All it takes is “the subtle exchange of a life.” In “Pruning the Orchard” she asks the muse for strength in her pruning wrist so she may open the spaces with discipline to a timeless orchard “poetry-possessed.” The final poem, “The Phoenix Again,” shows the bird, like a poet, rising from “seas of grief” to “sing her thrilling song.”