Books in Brief: A Reckoning

A Reckoning, by May Sarton (Norton, 254 pp., $9.95), and Selected Poems of May Sarton, edited by Serena Sue Hil-singer and Lois Brynes (Norton, 193 pp., $9.95). In May Sarton’s A Reckoning, Laura Spelman learns she has inoperable cancer, then realizes how ill-prepared she is to cope with death. She wants to take stock of her life, clear away the non-essential. Oddly enough, most of her family and friends turn out to be just that; but she finds it impossible to abstract herself from others in the process of dying. “The web of human relations entangles and nourishes at the same time.” She finds her real connections with women, sorting out ambivalent feelings toward her domineer” mother, her sisters, her lifelong friend, establishing these connections, Laura sees that being a woman is far more complex and difficult than being a man, and this understanding becomes the beginning of her “letting go” of life. Miss Sarton handles this delicate subject gracefully, absorbing the reader in Laura’s turmoil without depressing him. She touches on the indignities of dying, the cruelty of hospitals, the spirit trapped inside the body’s broken shell, the fact that only the living can be healed by love—the dying must separate themselves from love. In A Reckoning, Laura is forced into these realizations; Miss Sarton already has come to terms with death’s immediacy, as she reveals in her recently published Selected Poems. “Departure is the constant at this stage; / And all we know is that we cannot stop.” But she does not dwell on death. Her poetry flows with the emotion of daily routines—smooth and calm, reassuring in its lack of extremes. Tableaux of life come alive in her poems; she records events and scenes with a painter’s eye. She draws her metaphors from nature, whose cycle of creation and recreation she celebrates. If humanity could learn to let go “as trees let go / Their leaves, so casually,” May Sarton convinces us, love would endure.

LP

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Laurie Prothro

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A Reckoning, by May Sarton (Norton, 254 pp., $9.95), and Selected Poems of May Sarton, edited by Serena Sue Hil-singer and Lois Brynes (Norton, 193 pp., $9.95). In May Sarton’s A Reckoning, Laura Spelman learns she has inoperable cancer, then realizes how ill-prepared she is to cope with death. She wants to take stock of her life, clear away the non-essential. Oddly enough, most of her family and friends turn out to be just that; but she finds it impossible to abstract herself from others in the process of dying. “The web of human relations entangles and nourishes at the same time.” She finds her real connections with women, sorting out ambivalent feelings toward her domineer” mother, her sisters, her lifelong friend, establishing these connections, Laura sees that being a woman is far more complex and difficult than being a man, and this understanding becomes the beginning of her “letting go” of life. Miss Sarton handles this delicate subject gracefully, absorbing the reader in Laura’s turmoil without depressing him. She touches on the indignities of dying, the cruelty of hospitals, the spirit trapped inside the body’s broken shell, the fact that only the living can be healed by love—the dying must separate themselves from love. In A Reckoning, Laura is forced into these realizations; Miss Sarton already has come to terms with death’s immediacy, as she reveals in her recently published Selected Poems. “Departure is the constant at this stage; / And all we know is that we cannot stop.” But she does not dwell on death. Her poetry flows with the emotion of daily routines—smooth and calm, reassuring in its lack of extremes. Tableaux of life come alive in her poems; she records events and scenes with a painter’s eye. She draws her metaphors from nature, whose cycle of creation and recreation she celebrates. If humanity could learn to let go “as trees let go / Their leaves, so casually,” May Sarton convinces us, love would endure.