( These poem-stories are a strange retelling of seventeen...)
These poem-stories are a strange retelling of seventeen Grimms fairy tales, including "Snow White," "Rumpelstiltskin," "Rapunzel," "The Twelve Dancing Princesses," "The Frog Prince," and "Red Riding Hood." Astonishingly, they are as wholly personal as Anne Sexton's most intimate poems. "Her metaphoric strength has never been greater -- really funny, among other things, a dark, dark laughter" (C.K. Williams).
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/061808343X/?tag=2022091-20
( This selection, which is drawn from Anne Sexton's ten p...)
This selection, which is drawn from Anne Sexton's ten published volumes of poems as well as from representative early and last work, is an ideal introduction to a great American poet.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0618057048/?tag=2022091-20
(Hardcover, 1978. 101 pgs. Very good with some shelf wear;...)
Hardcover, 1978. 101 pgs. Very good with some shelf wear; tiny tear on spine of dust jacket. Small bookstore date notation in pencil on inside cover page. Interior excellent. Different cover.
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(Despair and the manifestations of death are discussed by ...)
Despair and the manifestations of death are discussed by the modern woman poet
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(MERCY STREET is Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Anne Sexton's...)
MERCY STREET is Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Anne Sexton's only play and incorporates many of the themes that infuse her poetry, the deeply personal, the nature of madness, and the subjectivity of truth. "Anne Sexton, a fine poet with an astounding knack for incorporating the ugly and immediate vocabulary of the pressing workaday world into lyrics that nevertheless remain lyrics, is the author of MERCY STREET ... The play is constructed quite literally to resemble the Offertory in Anglican or Roman Catholic mass ... Miss Sexton's initial use of ritual is striking ... The exploration, in rotating flashbacks, produces some riveting line-images ..." -Walter Kerr, The New York Times "... This is Miss Sexton's first play. She is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, and the tone of her poems has always been laceratingly personal. In some she seemed like a latter-day, neurotic Emily Dickinson. The poems have a voice of their own, and a way with imagery. MERCY STREET is the story of a woman searching her way home from the valley of madness ... Miss Sexton has written a play to be considered rather than dismissed ..." -Clive Barnes, The New York Times
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0881455679/?tag=2022091-20
(The late poet's first posthumous collection combines inte...)
The late poet's first posthumous collection combines intense self-exposure and selective description in verse accounts of personal and social experiences and concerns during the last three years of her life
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0395242959/?tag=2022091-20
(The author expresses her views on life, personal relation...)
The author expresses her views on life, personal relationships, and religion in this selection of poetry and prose
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(Color illustrated child's story of the adventures of Buzz...)
Color illustrated child's story of the adventures of Buzz, Skippy, Pest, and Cowboy.
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( Twenty-five poems celebrating the sensual frontiers of ...)
Twenty-five poems celebrating the sensual frontiers of Sexton's time.
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(From Wikipedia: Sexton's eighth collection of poetry is e...)
From Wikipedia: Sexton's eighth collection of poetry is entitled The Awful Rowing Toward God. The title came from her meeting with a Roman Catholic priest who, although unwilling to administer last rites, told her "God is in your typewriter." This gave the poet the desire and willpower to continue living and writing. The Awful Rowing Toward God and The Death Notebooks are among her final works and both centre on the theme of dying.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/039520366X/?tag=2022091-20
( An expression of an extraordinary poet's life story in ...)
An expression of an extraordinary poet's life story in her own words, this book shows Anne Sexton as she really was in private, as she wrote about herself to family, friends, fellow poets, and students. Anne's daughter Linda Gray Sexton and her close confidant Lois Ames have judiciously chosen from among thousands of letters and provided commentary where necessary. Illustrated throughout with candid photographs and memorabilia, the letters -- brilliant, lyrical, caustic, passionate, angry -- are a consistently revealing index to Anne Sexton's quixotic and exuberant personality.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0618492429/?tag=2022091-20
(This book of poems has the cumulative impact of a good no...)
This book of poems has the cumulative impact of a good novel. It has the richness variety and compactness of true poetry. It is a book to read and remembered. Sexton is an accomplished lyricist. She can combine the straightforwardness of playing on his speech with the saddle with the control, tight formal structure, and brilliantly effective imagery. But she makes her singular claim on our attention by the fact that she has important things to tell us and tells them dramatically.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0395081793/?tag=2022091-20
(Paperback 1962 68p. 8.25x5.60x0.30 The Poetry of Anne Se...)
Paperback 1962 68p. 8.25x5.60x0.30 The Poetry of Anne Sexton."The book is a Work of Genius.It Signifies a Moment of Major Importance to American Literature." James Wright.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0395081777/?tag=2022091-20
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009LLPUFE/?tag=2022091-20
( Collects the best of Anne Sexton's memoirs and prose re...)
Collects the best of Anne Sexton's memoirs and prose reflections on her development as a poet
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0472063669/?tag=2022091-20
(A collection of poems arranged chronologically to create ...)
A collection of poems arranged chronologically to create vivid, autobiographical impressions and images of melancholy
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0395081807/?tag=2022091-20
Anne Sexton was born Anne Gray Harvey on November 9, 1928 in Newton, Massachusetts to Mary Gray (Staples) Harvey (1901–1959) and Ralph Churchill Harvey (1900–1959). She had two older sisters, Jane Elizabeth (Harvey) Jealous (1923–1983) and Blanche Dingley (Harvey) Taylor (1925–2011). She spent most of her childhood in Boston.
In 1945 she enrolled at Rogers Hall boarding school, Lowell, Massachusetts, later spending a year at Garland School.
Sexton began writing poetry as a result of an emotional breakdown that led to serious depression. Her first of several suicide attempts was an overdose of Nembutal. Despite a lasting relationship with her psychiatrist, Martin Orne, Sexton lived a troubled life. As part of her therapy, Orne suggested Sexton write poetry, and she did.
Sexton began writing seriously in 1957, publishing To Bedlam and Part Way Back in 1960, a collection that won her significant praise for a first book. Though she received little formal training in poetics, claiming to learn meter by watching I. A. Richards on television, her poetry has notable formal sophistication. She is best known for the intensely personal quality of her work that early mentors, including John Holmes, tried to discourage in her. Sexton wrote about subjects that were previously unexplored in poetry, such as abortion, menstruation, and the allure of suicide for her. At a time when the most critically acclaimed poetry was considered "representative" of the human condition, Sexton wrote unabashedly about herself, writing on topics that some found "embarrassing" and others didn't even consider appropriate for poetry. Also noteworthy was the fascination with death that her poetry reveals, a fascination she shared with friend and fellow poet Sylvia Plath, whom she met while taking a writing seminar with Robert Lowell at Boston University. Previously, in a Holmes workshop, Sexton had met and struck up an important and lasting friendship with the poet Maxine Kumin. Kumin was the one with whom Sexton shared her ideas and early drafts of poems.
Though there is much scholarly disagreement about which poets should be included in what M. L. Rosenthal labeled the "confessional" school of poetry—so named because of the confessional quality in the work—no one seems to argue with Sexton's placement therein. Others sometimes grouped with her as confessional poets include Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Allen Ginsberg, and Theodore Roethke. While this label is used disparagingly at times to describe Sexton's work, it is certainly an appropriate label, though Rosenthal actually fashioned it for Lowell rather than Sexton.
Despite frequent stays in a mental hospital and continual psychiatric therapy, Sexton published seven poetry collections in her lifetime with three more published post-humously. Her best work is probably found in All My Pretty Ones (1962), which bears an epigraph from Shakespeare's Macbeth. In that collection, too, Sexton professes her commitment to personal, confessional poetry in "With Mercy For The Greedy".
Among her best-known poems are "Her Kind, " after which Sexton named the band with which she later performed; "The Abortion"; "Letter Written on a Ferry While Crossing Long Island Sound"; "In Celebration of My Uterus"; and "The Ambition Bird. "
Notable in her work is the collection published in 1971 titled Transformations. In these poems Sexton retells some well-known Grimm's fairy tales from the perspective of "a middle-aged witch, me, " creating some comic moments and leading to some surprising conclusions that are not part of the original tales.
Sexton was an enormously popular reader on the poetry reading circuit. So popular was she, in fact, that she was able to command reading fees far in excess of those most poets received at the time. She was a glamorous woman— her early career before writing poetry included a brief stint as a model—and she had many fans, both inside and outside academia. Many thought of her as a celebrity first and a poet second.
Sexton made her final—this time successful—suicide attempt on October 4, 1974.
Anne Sexton is known for her highly personal, confessional verse. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967 for her book Live or Die. Themes of her poetry include her long battle against depression and mania, suicidal tendencies, and various intimate details from her private life, including her relationships with her husband and children.
Peter Gabriel dedicated his song "Mercy Street", from his 1986 album So, to Sexton. She has been described as a "personal touchstone" for Morrissey, former lead singer and lyricist of The Smiths. She is commemorated on the Boston Women's Heritage Trail.
(The late poet's first posthumous collection combines inte...)
( These poem-stories are a strange retelling of seventeen...)
(MERCY STREET is Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Anne Sexton's...)
( An expression of an extraordinary poet's life story in ...)
( This selection, which is drawn from Anne Sexton's ten p...)
(A collection of poems arranged chronologically to create ...)
(The author expresses her views on life, personal relation...)
(From Wikipedia: Sexton's eighth collection of poetry is e...)
( Collects the best of Anne Sexton's memoirs and prose re...)
(Color illustrated child's story of the adventures of Buzz...)
(Despair and the manifestations of death are discussed by ...)
( Twenty-five poems celebrating the sensual frontiers of ...)
(This book of poems has the cumulative impact of a good no...)
(Paperback 1962 68p. 8.25x5.60x0.30 The Poetry of Anne Se...)
(Hardcover, 1978. 101 pgs. Very good with some shelf wear;...)
Quotations:
“As it has been said:
Love and a cough
cannot be concealed.
Even a small cough.
Even a small love. ”
“Watch out for intellect,
because it knows so much it knows nothing
and leaves you hanging upside down,
mouthing knowledge as your heart
falls out of your mouth. ”
“Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard. ”
“I am stuffing your mouth with your
promises and watching
you vomit them out upon my face. ”
“As for me, I am a watercolor.
I wash off. ”
“Even so, I must admire your skill.
You are so gracefully insane. ”
“I like you; your eyes are full of language. "
She was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the first female member of the Harvard chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.
One of the main reasons behind her mental illnesses was believed to be sexual abuse by her parents during her childhood, which led to fear and trauma from an early age.
Anne Sexton got married at the age of nineteen to Alfred Muller Sexton II. The couple had two daughters. The marriage was a difficult one marred by insecurity and abuse. She did not have a good relationship with her children as well and is said to have resorted to abusing them on several occasions.
She had shared some tapes with her doctor, which were released after her death. Those tapes are said to have revealed her inappropriate behavior towards her daughters.
She also allegedly had an affair with one of her therapists, which was another reason for controversy during her lifetime. It is believed that this affair might have been the reason behind her suicide in 1974.
(1900–1959)
(1901–1959)
(1948-1973)
(1925–2011)
(1923–1983)
(1955)
(1953)
