Causeway
Elaine Sexton
“In their plainspoken
engagement with the actual world, Elaine Sexton’s poems are models
of crupulous attention, alert to the simple truth that everything is ‘part
of some bigger mystery’ so even a fish can sing a ‘psalm,’
a simple shoe be the subject of one. The poems in this impressive second
collection contain the sound of a consciousness meditating on what is
passing in the world and abiding in the heart and mind. Elegy without
sentimentality seems a natural part of Sexton’s keen-eared lyric
manner and, in every sense, responsibility. Lodged in various locales,
whether urban or rural, earthbound or on the open sea, answering a landscape,
a family memory, or the vagaries of love, the poems of Causeway
are always informed by an honest buoyancy of spirit that can mix ‘the
scent of lilacs’ with ‘smokers’ coughs,’ as imagination
testifies to the hard-won realization that ‘Even in these / toxic
times, we live, we thrive.’”
—Eamon Grennan
“‘Happiness in love, what a joke,’ Paul Eluard wrote to
Gala in a letter dated 6 March, 1933, and three-quarters of a century
later Elaine Sexton, in her second superb volume, struggles against such
cynicism in poems that address ‘every estuary’ of love—filial
love, romantic love, spiritual love—without refusing ‘to taste
the grit.’ Again and again the poet attempts to reconcile herself
to ‘the everyday obscene,’ always “searching for home /
in a thrift shop find, something a mother, / not yours or mine, left behind.’
Causeway celebrates the probability of such human connection in
poems taut and insistent and resonant with desire. When Sexton writes,
speaking for us all, ‘[T]he ones / who love me love me, god knows
why,’ we know she’s not quite joking.”
—Michael Waters
Praise for Sleuth:
“Elaine Sexton knows how to raise autobiography to the level of true
poetry, and this knack as much to do with her use of surprise. Just when
we think we know where one of her poems is going, we step into air. Sleuth
leads us carefully into her life through a series of bracing verbal delights.”
—Billy Collins
New
Issues Poetry & Prose, Western Michigan University, Dept. of English,
1903 W. Michigan Ave., Kalamazoo, MI 49008-5331
|
Home | Book
Index |