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    Coming into Eighty: Poems
    Coming into Eighty: Poems
    Coming into Eighty: Poems
    Ebook78 pages27 minutes

    Coming into Eighty: Poems

    By May Sarton

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    About this ebook

    In May Sarton’s seventeenth and final collection of poetry, the writer reflects on life, aging, and mortality
    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateMar 25, 2014
    ISBN9781480474314
    Coming into Eighty: Poems
    Author

    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. Printed

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