The Complete Poems Book

To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960) - 4/5
All My Pretty Ones (1962) - 5/5
Live or Die (1966) - 4/5
Love Poems (1969) - 5/5
Transformations (1971) - 3/5
The Book of Folly (1972) - 5/5
The Death Notebooks (1974) - 5/5
The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975) - 5/5

POSTHUMOUSLY PUBLISHED WORK -
45 Mercy Street (1976) - 5/5
Words for Dr. Y (1978) - 4/5

Other Poems (1971-1973) - 5/5
Scorpio, Bad Spider, Die (1971) - 5/5
Last Poems - 4/5

All Anne Sexton's major work in one place, plus previously unreleased material to complete, what is arguably, the greatest collection of poetry I have ever read. Only slightly hampered by 'Transformations', which seems out of place with everything else. She is at her troubling best when writing of death, wife beaters, mental illness, menstruation, and cancer, rather than Rumpelstiltskin, Cinderella, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Whilst I believe Transformations to be her weakest work, all the rest of it, she simply didn't put a foot wrong.
The later poems towards the end of her life clearly highlight a rapidly disturbed mind.
It's sad to see.

The facts of Anne's difficult and chaotic life are well known, and no other American poet in our time has cried out aloud publicly on so many private details. While the frankness of these revelations attracted many readers, especially women, who identified strongly with the female aspect of the poems, a number of critics - for the most part misogynist men, took offense. Probably down to the fact they couldn't handle a woman being talented, and doing so well.
The intimate details divulged in Sexton's poetry enchanted or repelled with equal passion. In addition to the strong feelings Anne's work aroused, there was the undeniable fact of her physical beauty. Her presence on the platform dazzled with its staginess, its props of water glass, cigarettes, and ashtray. She used pregnant pauses, husky whispers, pseudoshouts to calculated effect. A Sexton audience might hiss its displeasure or deliver a standing ovation. One thing it wouldn't have done, is doze off during a reading.

Anne basked in the attention she attracted, partly because it was antithetical to an earlier generation's view of the woman writer as 'poetess' and partly because she was flattered by and
enjoyed the adoration of her public. But behind the glamorously garbed woman lurked a terrified and homely child, cowed from the cradle onward, it seemed, by the indifference and cruelties of
her world. Her parents, she was convinced, had not wanted her to be born. Her sisters, she alleged, competed against and won out over her. Her teachers, unable to rouse the slumbering intelligence
from its hiding place, treated her with impatience and anger. Anne's counterphobic response to rejection and admonishment was always to defy, dare, press, contravene. Thus the frightened
little girl became a flamboyant and provocative woman, bursting at the seems to put pen to paper. The timid girl who skulked in closets burst forth as an exhibitionist, the intensely private individual bared her soul to the masses, and in public readings where almost invariably there was standing room only.

'All My Pretty Ones', 'The Death Notebooks' and the posthumously released '45 Mercy Street' I would say are my favourite volumes. But overall, there was very little to begrudge about.
Over 600 pages of simply great poetry.

It's impossible to pluck out of so many the poems that stuck in my mind, so have randomly picked three to finish off with.

A CURSE AGAINST ELEGIES

Oh, love, why do we argue like this?
I am tired of all your pious talk.
Also, I am tired of all the dead.
They refuse to listen,
so leave them alone.
Take your foot out of the graveyard,
they are busy being dead.
Everyone was always to blame:
the last empty fifth of booze,
the rusty nails and chicken feathers
that stuck in the mud on the back doorstep,
the worms that lived under the cat's ear
and the thin-lipped preacher
who refused to call
except once on a flea-ridden day
when he came scuffing in through the yard
looking for a scapegoat.
I hid in the kitchen under the ragbag.
I refuse to remember the dead.
And the dead are bored with the whole thing.
But you ' you go ahead,
go on, go on back down
into the graveyard,
lie down where you think their faces are;
talk back to your old bad dreams.

THREE GREEN WINDOWS

Half awake in my Sunday nap
I see three green windows
in three different lights '
one west, one south, one east.
I have forgotten that old friends are dying.
I have forgotten that I grow middle-aged.
At each window such rustlings!
The trees persist, yeasty and sensuous,
as thick as saints.
I see three wet gargoyles covered with birds.
Their skins shine in the sun like leather.

I'm on my bed as light as a sponge.
Soon it will be summer.
She is my mother.
She will tell me a story and keep me asleep
against her plump and fruity skin.
I see leaves '
leaves that are washed and innocent,
leaves that never knew a cellar,
born in their own green blood
like the hands of mermaids.

I do not think of the rusty wagon on the walk.
I pay no attention to the red squirrels
that leap like machines beside the house.
I do not remember the real trunks of the trees
that stand beneath the windows
as bulky as artichokes.
I turn like a giant,
secretly watching, secretly knowing,
secretly naming each elegant sea.

I have misplaced the Van Allen belt,
the sewers and the drainage,
the urban renewal and the suburban centers.
I have forgotten the names of the literary critics.
I know what I know.
I am the child I was,
living the life that was mine.
I am young and half asleep.
It is a time of water, a time of trees.

AS IT WAS WRITTEN

Earth, earth,
riding your merry-go-round
toward extinction,
right to the roots,
thickening the oceans like gravy,
festering in your caves,
you are becoming a latrine.
Your trees are twisted chairs.
Your flowers moan at their mirrors,
and cry for a sun that doesn't wear a mask.

Your clouds wear white,
trying to become nuns
and say novenas to the sky.
The sky is yellow with its jaundice,
and its veins spill into the rivers
where the fish kneel down
to swallow hair and goat's eyes.

All in all, I'd say,
the world is strangling.
And I, in my bed each night,
listen to my twenty shoes
converse about it.
And the moon,
under its dark hood,
falls out of the sky each night,
with its hungry red mouth
to suck at my scars.