Sarton Selected: An Anthology of the Journals, Novels, and Poetry of May Sarton

by May Sarton, Bradford Dunley Daziel (Editor), Bradford Dunley Daziel (Introduction)

Overview

In a career spanning sixty years, May Sarton has been heard and acclaimed by an ever growing number of readers. With sensitivity, insight, and bravery, she speaks for the unmarried woman, the woman artist, the aging woman; but in her exploration of life's hard decisions, its poignancies and joys, she speaks for everyone.

Her works ranges from passionately honest diaries like Journal of a Solitude and novels with memorable characters like As We Are Now to superbly crafted lyrical poems and evocative descriptions of nature in poetry and prose.

Here for the first time in an anthology of the best of May Sarton's novels, journals, and poetry. The editor, Bradford Dudley Daziel, is chairman of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Westbrook College in Portland, Maine.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393335835
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	01/01/1980
Pages:	392
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

May Sarton (1912-1995) was an acclaimed poet, novelist, and memoirist.

Editorial Reviews

This inspiriting collection gathers Sarton's zestful journals, fiction, essays on her craft, and the poetry--taut, formal and passionate--for which she is best known. Sarton, who will be 79 on publication daynifty! , writes of solitude, of ardent love and friendship, houses and gardens, painting and music, and the erotic act of art--as in her poems ``The Consummation'' and ``The Lady and the Unicorn.'' Her animal poems are poignant, often making application to humans; in ``Of Molluscs'' lovers, too, are ``shelled up in fears.'' Sarton explores age, sickness (in the novel A Reckoning ), even death as thresholds of deepening experience: the subjects of the poem ``Old Lovers at the Ballet'' find in themselves that ``the soul is a lithe and serene athlete.'' The narrator of ``My Father's Death'' compares her bereavement to a ship's being ``gently set free, / The landlocked, launched,'' and announces that she has ``slipped out from the embracing shore''' into new life. Poems of grief include a brilliant sestina, ``The Concentration Camps,'' with its unrelenting evocation of dead children's shoes. Westbrook College professor Daziel's gauche introduction dwells on Sarton's detractors, presuming the critical ``fate of May Sarton'' will be as a celebrant of ``traditionally female values (e.g. nurture) as opposed to someone like Joseph Conrad''--a wildly inept equation, for Sarton offers universally humane reflections in a feast of words. (May)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

``There is much I still hope to do,'' concludes then 75-year-old Sarton in After the Stroke: A Journal. The remarkably long career of poet/novelist Sarton, born in Belgium in 1912, is well represented in this anthology. With introductory essays by Daziel and Constance Hunting, this book offers selections from 13 of her books of poetry (written from 1930 to 1988), eight autobiographical writings, and a brief excerpt from the novel A Reckoning ( LJ 9/1/78). The novella As We Are Now (8/73) about a former teacher's painful confinement in a nursing home, is printed in its entirety. Concerned with healing and solitude, Sarton's prolific work is rooted in a New England tradition of self-analysis and community values. The unadorned prose of her journals, written even after a mastectomy and recovery from a stroke, presents this compassionate survivor, 79 years old at the publication of this work, at her best.--Frank Allen, Schenectady Cty. Community Coll., N.Y.

Library Journal