Halfway to Silence: Poems

By May Sarton

A striking collection of short poems from acclaimed writer May Sarton
After decades of writing flowing lyric verse, May Sarton’s style turned to short bursts of poetry. Likening poetry to gardening, she writes, “Muse, pour strength into my pruning wrist / That I may cut the way toward open space.” These condensed poems are rife with exuberant impressions of nature and of love. Included are two of Sarton’s most acclaimed poems, “Old Lovers at the Ballet” and “Of the Muse.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Mar 25, 2014
• ISBN: 9781480474284

May Sarton

May Sarton (1912–1995) was born on May 3 in Wondelgem, Belgium, and grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her first volume of poetry, Encounters in April, was published in 1937 and her first novel, The Single Hound, in 1938. Her novels A Shower of Summer Days, The Birth of a Grandfather, and Faithful Are the Wounds, as well as her poetry collection In Time Like Air, all received nominations for the National Book Award. An accomplished memoirist, Sarton came out as a lesbian in her 1965 book Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing. Her memoir Journal of a Solitude (1973) was an account of her experiences as a female artist. Sarton spent her later years in York, Maine, living and writing by the sea. In her last memoir, Endgame: A Journal of the Seventy-Ninth Year (1992), she shares her own personal thoughts on getting older. Her final poetry collection, Coming into Eighty, was published in 1994. Sarton died on July 16, 1995, in York, Maine.

Book preview

Halfway to Silence

Poems

May Sarton

Contents

Publisher’s Note

Airs above the ground

I

After All These Years

Two Songs

The Oriole

Old Trees

A Voice

The Balcony

The Myths Return

Time for Rich Silence

Three Things

The Lady of the Lake

First Autumn

Mal du Départ

II

Jealousy

Control

Along a Brook

Beggar, Queen, and Ghost

The Country of Pain

Out of Touch

At The Black Rock

III

The Turning of the Wind

After the Storm

Love

Of Molluscs

June Wind

The Summer Tree

Late Autumn

The Geese

Autumn Sonnets

Pruning the Orchard

Old Lovers at the Ballet

IV

On Sark

In Suffolk

A Winter Notebook

Of the Muse

Index

A Biography of May Sarton

Publisher’s Note

Long before they were ever written down, poems were organized in lines. Since the invention of the printing press, readers have become increasingly conscious of looking at poems, rather than hearing them, but the function of the poetic line remains primarily sonic. Whether a poem is written in meter or in free verse, the lines introduce some kind of pattern into the ongoing syntax of the poem’s sentences; the lines make us experience those sentences differently. Reading a prose poem, we feel the strategic absence of line.

But precisely because we’ve become so used to looking at poems, the function of line can be hard to describe. As James Longenbach writes in The Art of the Poetic Line, Line has no identity except in relation to other elements in the poem, especially the syntax of the poem’s sentences. It is not an abstract concept, and its qualities cannot be described generally or schematically. It cannot be associated reliably with the way we speak or breathe. Nor can its function be understood merely from its visual appearance on the page. Printed books altered our relationship to poetry by allowing us to see the lines more readily.

Reviews for Halfway to Silence

[bjellis_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is a book I've reread many times. There are half a dozen poems in here that are great, and keep pulling me back. The very first and very last ones are among the finest. But I think the entire middle section is weak -- the author is too muh in control of the poems, and makes them tell the message she has in mind. A few others suffer from this and it makes them predictable, sentimental. Still, for the excellent poems this volume does contain, I'll come back and reread it again I'm sure.