Love Poems

"Anne Sexton's Love Poems gave American literature its first fully sexual heroine.

The speaker of Sexton's poems dwells with husband and children in affluent, white Protestant America just after the death of JFK....More than a century earlier, Hawthorne had created in The Scarlet Letter a sexual female protagonist, Hester Prynne -- to exhibit her leading a life of disgrace at the margins of the town because of her sin of adultery. In Sexton's New England the margins of town have been transformed into suburbia, and adultery looms as the next horizon of sexual destiny, once marriage and childbirth have ripened a woman's body and mapped her pleasure centers. In 1969 this was new; no woman had published such poems in English for centuries." -- from the foreword by Diane Wood Middlebrook

Includes such notable poems as:

• "Love Songs"
• Song for a Lady"
• "For My Lover, Returning to His Wife"

"It is Anne Sexton at her best." - Diane Wood Middlebrook

"Anne Sexton sometimes seemed like a woman without skin. She felt everything so intensely, had so little capacity to filter out pain that everyday events often seemed unbearable to her. Paradoxically it is also that skinlessness which makes a poet. One must have the gift of language, of course, but even a great gift is useless without the other curse: the eyes that see so sharply they often want to close." - Erica Jong, New York Times