[In the following review, Ringold lauds the vitality and clarity of the poems in Letters from Maine as well as the entries in her journal At Seventy.]

In a year of what seems to be the celebration of the older writer—the eighty-eight-year-old Helen Hooven Santmyer's novel And Ladies of the Club and the seventy-three-year-old Harriet Doerr's book The Stones of Ibarra head the list of “discoveries” in 1984-85—let us pay tribute to May Sarton, one of the most vigorous voices of our century, who continues a distinguished career in letters into her seventies and beyond. Sarton, a clear disciple of the romantic tradition, makes poems “out of nothing, out of loss.” The best of the new poems in Letters from Maine, her fourteenth volume of verse, ring with the clarity, assurance, and ease of her newest journal, At Seventy. Indeed, the title section, “Letters from Maine,” reads much like a letter to oneself or a journal entry airing out one's inner world as it catalogues the events of the day: the messages in the mail, the kite “tossed by the wind,” the “whole sky orange as it rises.” Despite the casualness of tone, Sarton gets off many a good line and arresting entry into the universe of the poem: “There was your voice, astonishment, / Falling into the silence.” With all the riding of the world's tumult, we are led to see one playing the world's “perils like a game … to rejoice in the still quiet air.”

The quiet, however, is seldom enough. Sarton is often most herself when she takes on the diction and rhythms of the other: “‘When a woman feels alone, when the room / Is full of daemons,’ the Nootka tribe / Tells us, ‘The Old Woman will be there.’ … Old Woman I meet you deep inside myself / There in the rootbed of fertility.” Sarton seeks, despite momentary surges of primitive longing, “order in all things,” particularly “the inward order that makes it possible to shut out the chaos around [her]” (At Seventy). At the same time she speaks of being “torn in half” by distress, of being a familiar of passion. One is not surprised, therefore, to find many of her new poems attempting to shape, with absolute rhyme or preestablished rhythm, her rage within. Unfortunately, the ordered meters and rhyme scheme in “For Laurie,” for example, constrain but do not crystallize the content.

In “A Winter Garland,” in part 2 of Letters from Maine, Sarton often demonstrates her versatility as she shifts from the longer, relaxed line of “Letters,” or ineffectual formality, to tighter pillars of statement. In “Shell,” for example, we lift to our ear the “long reverberation” of the centuries of the sea's “susurration” and hear too, briefly, momentarily captured, the terrible silence that also is like love. Finding sustenance in the sea, the garden, and her “work,” Sarton is still “filled to the brim / with all that comes and goes, rejoicing.”

Though she has published fourteen volumes of poetry and seventeen novels, Sarton is even more vital in her eight nonfiction works. In At Seventy she chronicles the year that began on 3 May 1982, her seventieth birthday. Each daily entry pulses with the immediacy of everyday experience: gardening, the show of fritillarias with their purple-and-white-checkered bells, meetings with friends, even wrangles with the typewriter repairman become moments to savor. Best of all, we share the richness of Sarton's reflective life.

It is order in all things that rests the mind. … What is the inward order that makes it possible to shut out the chaos around me as I sit here? … A strong sense of priorities—friends, work, then the garden. … “To work is to feel whole. To work for long moments unselfconsciously is grand. To still all other voices and to work, just quietly work.”

Sarton quotes and affirms these last lines for our contemplation, lines from a letter she received from an artist friend. Indeed, it is not only Sarton's thoughts which warm us. We become privy to keen selections from other letters, to a sampler of poems by Sheila Moon, Constance Hunting, and P. K. Page—poems which are not easy to come by, poems which she has “copied out” for her own pleasure and support. We relish with Sarton memories and phrases and friends like Eva Le Gallienne, a companion of Civic Repertory days, who like Sarton is “still a friend of the earth,” blooming in her aging.

The style as well as the content of Sarton's journal entries transmits a vision of life, “a rich life bought at a high price in energy” but a life well worth the cost of its multiple “attachments”—or so we must think as we see Sarton “still vital, inquisitive, opinionated, healthy and willing to take risks” at seventy.