I had read so much about Sexton's dramatic readings and her absolute captivation of an audience through her reading. This tape, though, does not re-create that for me. It is infused with the drama characteristic of her performances, to be sure, but it is not the voice I expected from her and this somehow makes it disconcerting for me. She sounds (due to her habit of chain smoking much of her life) like an old woman, even though she was quite young. It's ok, but just not all that I expected.

Having to read the seminal poetry of Sexton--in my view a giant in the world of poetry (regarding just her talent for words alone, never mind her being a woman, etc., etc.)--and having to have fallen so deeply and intimately in love with the work--without ever having the opportunity to HEAR and LISTEN to her recite these masterpieces; well, that would be somewhat akin to having been given the gallies of all of Bob Dylan's lyrics, and never getting the chance to hear him sing[ing] them.Listening to her reading these words which I had known and admired for so long, and never knowing what her voice was like; finally hearing her speak the lines was like being in the room with a ghost who could make you hear her voice. Strangely, I felt throughout that I had known the voice all along...

This recording, made a few short months before Sexton's death, is a remarkable document for anyone interested in Sexton, confessional poetry, or American literature in general. The selection of poems is at once characteristic of Sexton's work without becoming overly monotonous in tone or subject, but it is really the sound of the author's own voice that makes the poetry come alive. Sexton's dark voice adds an element of authenticity to these poems that is perhaps lost when they are read silently. Her convincing reading is truly a testament to her own tortured yet beautifully rendered artistic vision.

I have Anne Sexton's complete works, and this book rises above the rest. The fairy tale framework compels more structure and discipline from a poet accustomed to rambling (but often brilliant) confessional observation. It is, in my estimation, her finest work.

Her take on "Snow White" refuses to establish heroines or villains. The girl is a lovely virgin, "cheeks as fragile as cigarette paper...lips like Vin du Rhone." The jealous queen, still beautiful at middle age but fearing that time isn't on her side and informed by her mirror she's no longer "the fairest of them all," tries to kill her. For this, she is punished by torture. The twist here is that Sexton makes it clear that some day the virgin girl will meet the queen's fate: "Meanwhile Snow White held court,/ rolling her china-blue eyes open and shut/ and sometimes referring to her mirror/ as women do."

The lesbian implications of "Rapunzel" are brought to the fore, and the transvestite deception of "Little Red Riding Hood" is remarked on. Sexton crashes the dreamy romance of Cinderella with the mundane reality of marriage. "Happily ever after" is contrasted with "diapers...arguing...getting a middle-aged spread." The Freudian power of mother is accented in the poet's take on "Hansel and Gretel"; Sexton brings out dark implications of child murder and pedophilia that the original tale merely glosses.

Twenty years before Robert Bly tackled the "Iron John" fairy tale, Sexton put her spin on it, stressing the main character's cannibalism and outcast status. She compares the hairy wild man to a string of deeply troubled characters from her imagination. It is here where her poetry reaches the peak of its intensity: "A lunatic wearing that strait jacket/ like a sleeveless sweater, singing to the wall like Muzak.../ And if they stripped him bare/ he would fasten his hands around your throat/ After that he would take your corpse/ and deposit his sperm in three orifices./ You know, I know,/ you'd run away."

Sexton's deep-delving into childhood stories, unearthing the very real and plausible taboos they skirt, is refreshing. Her anachronistic use of modern language (Muzak, for instance) is artful and effective. The best thing about this book, however, is that so much madness and sadness is surmised from such timeless and appealing stories. Happy endings are left intact but with a shadow cast over them. Sexton is a poet of the dark--with no one to save her "from the awful babble of that calling."

In all my readings of fairy tale variations, this has to be one of the best. Anne Sexton takes a grim and twisted approach to the already grim and twisted versions of the Grimm Brothers.

Of course, these poems are simply an extension of Anne Sexton's already established confessional form, but poetry is, first and foremost, an expression of society. These poems fail to remain part of Sexton's inner turmoil. Rather, they mock society and the roles that women are traditionally placed within fairy tales. Anne Sexton, in an example here, uses anachronisms to reach her audience, making references to popular culture.

The Queen Cried two pails of sea water. She was as persistent as a Jehovah's Witness.

Anne Sexton, "Rumpelstiltskin"

Although Sexton's poems are not suitable for an audience of children, they do serve as interesting, even necessary reading, once a child has matured and read beyond the traditional fairy tales that are 'suitable' for kids.

I teach Anne Sexton in my freshman College English class and I work specifically from this text because the stories are at once familiar shared traditions and disturbing alterations of those traditions. The 18 year olds I teach, who only know fairy tales from the white-washed Disney versions, are intrigued by these dark and psychological interpretations. For the fairy tale afficianado these poems are a must read.

Okay. No offense to Anne Sexton, but this book just doesn't cut it. The people who did the "selecting" didn't do a very good job. Many good poems which are hard to find are found, but many of her greatest that are easily found aren't even mentioned in this book. And why does Middlebrook always do the commentaries?? I love Anne Sexton and she needs to be portrayed for her art, not for the mentally ill, depressed, phsychotic person that she was. I mean--her poetry is terrific, and personally, I don't think that Middlebrook does a very good job of summarizing Anne Sexton to the readers.

I'd seriously have to bicker with another reviewer and state that Middlebrook did a fine job selecting the "most worthy" of Sexton's poetry. Let's face it: towards the end of Sexton's career as a poet, she pumped out more garbage than grandeur...and Middlebrook (whose biography on Sexton, by the way, is among the best biographies on ANYbody) seems perfectly aware of that. With "Selected Poems" in print, scholars of poetry no longer have to plow through rubble to find a few diamonds.

Selected Poems of Anne Sexton draws from poet Sexton's ten published works of poems as well as from her last pieces to provide a fine introduction and overview to her best works. The editors reveal a wide range of styles and themes and provide new readers with a definitive overview. Highly recommended.

This collection features some of the early works of Anne Sexton as she struggled with mental illness and emmotional trouble. It is a profoundly power commentary on the inner state and malignacy towards the world she was feeling in her life. Each poem works together to create a emulsified whole.

This whole series is really good; I first read "Don't Ask" which focuses on Philip Levine. I wanted to know more about Anne Sexton after reading Middlebrook's bio and this was a good source. The interviews were very entertaining and informative. Prepare yourself, however, for a fair amount of repetition as she like to tell the same stories over and over.

Reading Anne Sexton's poetry is amazing by itself, so imagine what it would be like to hear them read out loud by miss Sexton herself. A great experience for a true poetry lover.

What to make of this sorid little book of verse? Its like watching someone disembowel themselves, draw up a schematic of what they should "really" look like, and then try, like Humpty Dumpty, to put themselves back together again.

Yet, somewhere here Anne Sexton reaches for something a little further from (and at the same time closer to) herself...namely, God. And that is what these poems are: Sexton wrestling with her God. A brief taste of what this text is like (from "The Sickness Unto Death" which is one of my favorite poems contained in the book)--

"I who was a house full of bowel movement,
I who was a defaced altar,
I who wanted to crawl toward God
could not move nor eat bread.

So I ate myself,
bite by bite,
and the tears washed me,
wave after cowardly wave,
swallowing canker after canker
and Jesus stood over me looking down
and He laughed to find me gone,
and put His mouth to mine
and gave me His air."

There is much to meditate on within the pages of "The Awful Rowing Toward God." When it comes to matters such as spiritual suffering, seeking, and pain, Mrs. Sexton seems to have had some experience. No doubt, this will not be everyone's cup of tea. Nevertheless, there is much of value here.

That is why I recommend this book.

Anne Sexton's final battles with her personal demons are documented here and it does not make for easy reading. The book opens with the poem Rowing and ends with The Rowing Endeth and inbetween are extraordinarily powerful poems about life, death, despair, the suicidal impulsive and mercifully about love too. Referring to herself as Ms Dog, the author very honestly examines her psyche in poems like The Civil War, The Room Of My Life and The Witch's Life, a poem that continues a theme established by Her Kind in the first volume To Bedlam And Part Way Back and continued through The Black Art in All My Pretty Ones. A poem like Courage overflows with hurt but has a transcendent quality too and the same duality or conflict becomes very clear in the poem After Auschwitz, where she declares: "Man ... / .../ is not a temple/but an outhouse", proceeding to curse mankind, before concluding with: "I say these things aloud./ I beg the Lord not to hear." The Poet Of Ignorance is painful to read as the arresting image of an indestructible crab gripping the poet's heart becomes a metaphor for mental pain. This oppressive image is reiterated in The Dead Heart, where the tongue did the killing, a theme more delicately investigated in the next poem, Words. The following one, The Sickness Unto Death, must be one of the bleakest poems in the English language in its seemingly casual wrestling with evil and utter despair. The line "My body became a side of mutton/and despair roamed the slaughterhouse" perhaps best encapsulates the unrelenting torment. Mercifully, poems like Welcome Morning - a description of a burst of domestic joy - and The Big Heart - where the "fury of love" for friends and family rushes into her heart, show the other side of Sexton's intensity of feeling. The Awful Rowing Toward God was the last book to be arranged by the author herself and is not recommended for the fragile reader. It reflects the agonizing search for meaning that is so universal to the individual consciousness. But perhaps because of the intensity, some of the musical rhythm of her work from especially the two aforementioned books is missing here. There is still the conversational style, but it would appear that the large crab gripping Sexton's heart was squeezing very hard here, suffocating all but the most unquenchable outbursts of joy like Welcome Morning.

Patient records are privileged; Dr. Orne justifies releasing tapes of Anne Sexton's therapy because the daughter of A.S. approved. He wrote the preface to the book, displaying a rather passive attitude to the malfeasance of the therapist who slept with A.S. And does the end--understanding creativity/a poet's life and death--justify the means? Do outpourings in therapy tell readers about where creativity comes from, how it is shaped, the interplay of life and art? I doubt it. People "edit" their therapy talk, too, though differently from their public utterings. Readers may be seduced by these secrets, hoping to find answers that cannot be given, even--maybe especially--by therapists. I think the biographer overplays her hand, and might have done a better book without the controversial tapes.

I have been unable to stop re-reading this biography for all the hidden keys I think it contains -- comments on our western culture as a viable concept; networking in the "literary world," motherlove an an ontological reality; therapy as same. The author Middleton is so adept at being unbiased toward the at times somewhat narrow, but riveting, scope of Sexton's experience (I accused her delicate side-stepping in an earlier review as being "dull-witted") that I have been attempting to read between the lines. I haven't gleaned any "truths" but because of this, keep coming back. I think the strongest thing about Middleton's account is the sense of the universal story of a family struggle, and the bond of the family which guided Sexton's poetry and had much bearing on her life. This is important for me to tell myself, I find myself feeling, in reading this one "too many times." I hope Middleton writes more biographies of women.

The biographer here had an unusual advantage: Anne Sexton's daughter gave her access to taped sessions Sexton's psychiatrist had made of his sessions with Sexton. This disclosure of what are normally privileged sessions raised eyebrows, but I did not find the disclosure obtained from these tapes that revealing. It was obvious to anyone who came into contact with her that Sexton was a very disturbed person, and her doctor does not seem to have come to a definitive diagnosis. It may well be that she suffered from some physical defect of the brain that could not be diagnosed during her lifetime.

What is clear is that Sexton made life difficult for those closest to her, such as her husband and her children. Wildly unstable, she demanded more than anyone could give, and gave back little in return. On the other hand, she was one of the major poets of her time, and talented writers can get away with being miserable people. A weakness of this book is that it not very strong on Sexton's poetry, which is the only reason people are interested in her. Still, it is well researched, and is likely to remain useful to those interested in Sexton for years to come.