Coming into Eighty: Poems
By May Sarton
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About this ebook
Coming into Eighty presents a poet’s look at age. Herein, Sarton gives readers a glimpse into her quotidian tasks, her memories, her losses, and her triumphs. The volume explores topics ranging from the war in Iraq to the struggle of taking a cat to the vet. Dark and immediate, this work catalogues both the tedium and the splendor of life with equal wit and beauty. Winner of the Levinson Prize.
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.
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Book preview
Coming into Eighty - May Sarton
Coming Into Eighty
Poems
May Sarton
To Pierrot
The Muse Mews
Contents
Publisher’s Note
PREFACE
Coming into Eighty
Renascence
I Wanted Poems to Come
The O’s of November
December Moon
As Fresh, As Always New
Small Joys
A Thought
Friendship and Illness
Best Friend
The Teacher
Rinsing the Eye
Palm
After the Long Enduring
Elegy
The Artist
All Souls 1991
The Absence of God
The Use of Force
The Scream
Guilt
Melancholy
For My Mother
Getting Dressed
Friend or Enemy
Wanting to Die
The Tides
Lunch in the Garden
Obit
A Fortune
To Have What I Have
Bliss
Luxury
The Ender, The Beginner
A Handful of Thyme
Birthday Present
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.
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