Word: sextons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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NONFICTION: Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters, edited by Linda Gray Sexton and Lois Ames ∙The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh, edited by Michael Davie ∙Dispatches, Michael Herr ∙Parallel Botany, Leo Lionni The River Congo, Peter Forbath
...other contemporary American poet has written more urgently and directly about this fatal shunt than Anne Sexton. Her poems were torn from her life as a daughter, housewife, mother, lover, mental patient and custodian of what she called "the excitable gift." The phrase is from her poem "Live," from a collection that embraced such titles as "Wanting to Die," "Suicide Note" and "Sylvia's Death." Plath (1932-63) and Sexton (1928-74) were friends who spent hours discussing their art, illnesses and the ways they would kill themselves. Yet it is difficult to read Sexton's correspondence...
...bravura of such statements must be weighed against Sexton's desperate reliance on family, friends and Pharmaceuticals. Her need for love and reassurance was inexhaustible. "I want everyone to hold up large signs saying YOU'RE A GOOD GIRL," she confesses to Poet W.D. Snodgrass, the "Snodsy" of dozens of mash notes. Sexton could not settle for having ordinary pen pals. Her correspondents were her audience, confessors, advisers and advisees. Editors Linda Gray Sexton, the poet's elder daughter, and Lois Ames, a close friend and estate-designated biographer, make it quite clear that...
...apparently gave him cause. Sexton was a demanding child, prankish and defiant. She grew into a beautiful young woman who enjoyed playing one boy off against another. In 1948 Anne, 19, eloped with Alfred ("Kayo") Sexton, a 20-year-old college student ("Dearest Momie and Daddie-I don't know how to begin this letter"). By 1957 Kayo was a traveling wool salesman and Anne had two young daughters and a bad case of the housewife blues...
...urging of her psychiatrist, Sexton began to write verse. What started as therapy quickly became a craft, a vocation and a career. Her letters frequently refer to poetry as her life saver, but elsewhere she sees her work as appalling in its blunt candor. "Creative people must not avoid the pain that they get dealt," she writes an editor. "I say to myself, sometimes repeatedly 'I've got to get the hell out of this hurt' ... But no. Hurt must be examined like a plague...