This Sunday night: An upper-middle-class suburban housewife and mother suffers from severe postpartum depression, is hospitalized for it, and as part of her treatment is encouraged by her therapist to write. A not so unusual story, but in this case the writer is Anne Sexton, who became one of the most honored and popular poets of the latter half of the twentieth century, before her death by suicide at the age of 45. She’s best known for her confessional poetry and for Transformations, her arch take on the tales made famous by the Brothers Grimm. However, since it’s Christmas Eve today I thought I’d feature the first poem in her series “The Jesus Papers,” titled “Jesus Suckles”:
Mary, your great white apples make me glad. I feel your heart work its machine and I doze like a fly. I cough like a bird on its worm. I’m a jelly-baby and you’re my wife. You’re a rock and I the fringy algae. You’re a lily and I’m the bee that gets inside. I close my eyes and suck you in like a fire. I grow. I grow. I’m fattening out. I’m a kid in a rowboat and you’re the sea, the salt, you’re every fish of importance. No. No. All lies. I am small and you hold me. You give me milk and we are the same and I am glad. No. No. All lies. I am a truck. I run everything. I own you.
If you’d like to read more
- Poetry Foundation: A biography of and selected poems by Anne Sexton.
- Internet Archive:
- Selected Poems of Anne Sexton, with a foreword by Diana Hume George and an introduction by Diane Wood Middlebrook. This contains most but not all of the poems in “The Jesus Papers.” (The Internet Archive does not appear to have a copy of The Complete Poems.)
- “Anne Sexton, Poems (Part 3)” is an audio recording of Sexton reading some of her poems, including “Jesus Cooks” and “Jesus Walking.”
- Bookshop.org:
- Selected Poems of Anne Sexton, with a foreword by Diana Hume George and an introduction by Diane Wood Middlebrook. (Bookshop.org does not carry The Complete Poems, but you can find it at other online bookstores.)
- Transformations, by Anne Sexton. This is probably my single favorite Sexton collection.
- Other:
- As I’ll note again in future, the Poetry Foundation biographies often whitewash certain aspects of poets’ lives, at least modern ones. The Wikipedia article on Sexton offers another take on her life and legacy.