I am ashamed to confess that I was, until recently, unfamiliar with the work of Anne Sexton.

That I have discovered her now is thanks to a remarkable album by Val-Inc which I have just reviewed for Whisperin’ and Hollerin’. This record uses samples from two of Sexton’s poems read by the author herself. The poems are ‘Music Swims Back To Me’ and ‘Her Kind’.

These, as with all her poetry, came about as a direct result of therapy. Sexton struggled with depression and obsessions with suicide. Her psychotherapists advised her to try and put her fears into words. The result they may have been cathartic but didn’t serve as a cure as she eventually took her own life aged 46 in 1974.
She has been called a ‘confessional poet’ because of the candour with which she describes her profound anxieties and related struggles to connect with other people.

Many critics questions the artistic merits of writing , many more  were uncomfortable with writing that was so raw and personal. This didn’t stop her from winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1967. on the strength of her collection ‘Live or Die’ .

To see the world without a filter is liable to drive anyone crazy. What is regarded as conventional and ‘proper’ behaviour means to play along with forms of deceit that make the unpalatable bearable. For instance, most of us prefer not to think about death until the grim reality of it stares us in the face through the loss of a loved one. To refuse to go along with this pretence is to risk, at best, being labelled lacking in social graces, at worth being certified as insane.

Sexton’s inner turmoil stems from the fact that she could not live her life according to the surface ‘pleasantries’  Erica Jong, wrote that: “She is an important poet not only because of her courage in dealing with previously forbidden subjects, but because she can make the language sing”.
This is her poem ‘Her Kind’ :

I have gone out, a possessed witch,

haunting the black air, braver at night;

dreaming evil, I have done my hitch

over the plain houses, light by light:

lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.

A woman like that is not a woman, quite.

I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,

filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,

closets, silks, innumerable goods;

fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:

whining, rearranging the disaligned.

A woman like that is misunderstood.

I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,

waved my nude arms at villages going by,

learning the last bright routes, survivor

where your flames still bite my thigh

and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.

A woman like that is not ashamed to die.

I have been her kind.

Film of her reading her works show that she was also a very sensual woman and what a great loss it was that she died so young: