Böcker av May Sarton

Lucid, ardent, and contemplative, May Sarton is one of America's best-loved writers. This comprehensive collection - the first in twenty years - celebrates six decades of bold imagination and fifteen books of poetry, the creative output of a lifetime. Arranged chronologically, these poems reveal the full breadth of Sarton's creative vision. Themes include the search for an inward order, her passions, the natural world, self-knowledge, and, in her latest poems, the trials of old age. Moving through Sarton's work, we see her at ease in both traditional forms and free verse, finding inspiration in snow over a dark sea, a cat's footfall on the stairs, an unexpected love affair. Here is the creative process itself, its sources, demands, and joys - a handbook of the modern poetic psyche.

Her works ranges from passionately honest diaries like Journal of a Solitude and novels with memorable characters like As We Are Now to superbly crafted lyrical poems and evocative descriptions of nature in poetry and prose.Here for the first time in an anthology of the best of May Sarton's novels, journals, and poetry. The editor, Bradford Dudley Daziel, is chairman of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Westbrook College in Portland, Maine.

May Sarton's love for Juliette Huxley, ignited that first moment she saw her in 1936, transcended sixty years of friendship, passion, rejection, silence, and reconciliation. The letters chart their meeting, May's affair with Juliette's husband Julian (brother of Aldous Huxley) before the war, her intense involvement with Juliette after the war, and the rich, ardent friendship that endured until Juliette's death. While May's intimate relationship with Julian was not a secret, May's more powerful romance with Juliette was. May's fiery passion was a seductive yet sometimes destructive force. Her feelings for and demands on Juliette were often overwhelming to them both. In fact, Juliette refused all contact with May for nearly twenty-five years. Their reconciliation, after Julian's death, wasn't so much a rekindling as it was a testament to the profound affinity between them. Theirs was a relationship rife with complications and misunderstandings but the deep love and compassion they shared for one another prevailed. Included in this book are Sarton's original drafts of an introduction to these letters.

Emotional and forthright, Anna battles against Ned's crippling reserve. In the clash of these two strong personalities, May Sarton explores the different ways that men and women express both anger and love.

Sarton writes perceptively of how age affects her: the way small things take longer and tire more, what it feels like to endure pain and to be afraid. Other days her energy returns, her spirits lift, and projects abound. Readers both new and old will cherish this latest dispatch from her ongoing journey.

This novel, first published in 1946, is one of May Sarton's earliest and, some critics think, one of her best. It takes place during the years between the world wars and explores the life of a Belgian family, the Duchesnes, and their mutual devotion which intensifies under the shadow of impending disaster.Mélanie Duchesne, mother of three, is an active businesswoman, whose courage, energy, and optimism bind the family and its farm together. Paul, her husband, is a philosopher, detached, moody, continually embroiled in the spiritual conflicts of a crumbling Europe.The last years before the second war are tense ones, a time for stock-taking, for a quickening of the pace of life. But it is Mélanie who encourages her family to proceed with their plans, to continue with their way of life. And it is Mélanie who decides their future as the Germans launch their invasion of Belgium.

May Sarton's ninth novel explores a woman's struggle to reconcile the claims of life and art, to transmute passion and pain into poetry. As it opens, Hilary Stevens, a renowned poet in her seventies, is talking with Mar, an intense young man who has sought her out and whose passionate despair reminds her of herself when young. Mar has had an unhappy love affair with a man. Bewildered by both his sexuality and his writing talent, he flings his anguish against Hilary's brusque, sympathetic intelligence.

An extended fable about a Latin mistress, in retirement with her translations of Horace, and a hobo who takes up residence in the henhouse nearby.

Anxiously embarking on her first teaching job, Lucy Winter arrives at a New England women's college and shortly finds herself in the thick of a crisis: she had discovered a dishonest act committed by a brilliant student who is a protegee of a powerful faculty member.

The "magnificent spinster" is Jane Reid, a teacher who became not only a revered role model but a dear friend to Cam, the narrator of this novel within a novel. After Jane's death, the accidental discovery of poems written by Cam in her youth to Jane prompts a flood of recollections-and frees Cam to imagine in fiction Jane's passionately vibrant life.

One of the most beloved stories ever written about sharing one's life with a cat.

May Sarton's eagerly awaited journals have recorded her life as a single, woman writer--and, in later years, as a woman confronting old age. This chronicle of her pilgrimage through her 82nd year was completed a few months before she died in 1995. Illustrations.

Here are Sarton's observations and reflections, many of which came to her as if by magic during the small hours of the morning. Along with the daily events of writing a letter, appreciating her flowers, taking care of her car Pierrot, these poems wrestle with the larger questions of life and death, the difficulties and rewards of living alone.

For Joanna the month's holiday was to be an escape, a chance to paint and think and release the bitter memories of the war in Greece and of her mother's death.

"I had always imagined a philosophical journal of my seventy-ninth year, dealing with the joys and problems, the doors opening out from old age to unknown efforts and surprises. I looked forward to the year as a potent harvest," May Sarton writes. Assailed by debilitating illnesses, Sarton found herself instead using much of her energy battling for health. Yet, as this record shows, she did after all do what she had wanted to, as she persevered in work, friendships, and love of nature, discovering in the process new landscapes in the country of old age.

"A small, sophisticated, elegantly sentimental journey through a New Hampshire village summer. Our companions are an aging poet, who is sad because he can no longer write-he has lost the joy he used to have in simply being alive-and a young, mischievous female donkey, who is sad because she can't run and play-she has a touch of arthritis. . . . There is a moral, of course, but any moral looks dull next to the simple happiness of the old poet and his long-eared muse."-The New Yorker

Grandfathers are generally produced by the birth of grandchildren. But Sprig Wyeth needed more than the arrival of his first grandchild to welcome that role.

"Its revelations, its tender frankness, its acutely sensitive observations recommend [this book] to Sarton's growing legion of readers." -Choice

Ethereal and sensual, these intensely vivid poems capture the sights and textures of new places, people, and landscapes as experienced with a poet's fresh eye.

"Her complex ideas are born into verse with the easy, simple beauty that is typical of her stunning lyric style."-Boston Globe

"At long last in early June the Gordons were expected home at Dene's Court, the house in Ireland which Violet Dene Gordon had inherited."

"Sarton's 'art of making exquisite distinctions' and her vulnerability as a human being are her timeless gifts to her readers." -Library Journal

"Only a poet and, perhaps, only a young poet could have written this beautiful and distinguished first novel." -New York Times

Set in the academic world of Harvard and Cambridge, this novel dramatizes the plight of the embattled American liberal in the 1950s.

This is the first journal Sarton wrote after she moved in 1973 from New Hampshire to the seacoast of Maine.

Appearing in book form for the first time, this treasure trove of letters illuminates the life of the beloved poet/writer from early childhood into middle age.

The author chronicles her efforts to regain her health after having suffered a stroke at the age of seventy-three, describes her self-proclaimed life of solitude, and offers keen observations on the natural world surrounding her.

It is the death of Persis Bradford, Francis's mother, a most unusual woman with an intense feeling for living, that starts the son on his road to maturity. Grief opens his eyes, not only to himself but to Alan Bradford, the stepfather he has always disliked. A summer in Paris is to Francis a journey of the spirit in which he learns, through Solange Bernard, to love and finds through love, how integrate his mixed heritage and how to make use of it. The strange summer, partly idyllic, partly miserable, brings Francis to himself and sends him home to Ann, the young woman whom he has never had the courage to love.

Compilation of intense, spirited verse which explores the realms of religion, politics, nature, violence, and old age.

"May Sarton's provocative novel is about a wife who has outgrown her husband, and after twenty-seven years of marriage decides that she has had enough. . . . she is altogether believable." -The Atlantic