Book Review: "Mercies" by Anne Sexton

I have not read anything by Anne Sexton for a few years now and yet, this book has become one of my quick go-to collections by her since it was released by Penguin. When I first got around to reading this book I wanted to focus on the way in which I remembered Anne Sexton - descriptive situations about the contemplation of pain and death, suffering and depression. When I read poetry, I normally read things like Lord Byron, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, W.H Auden, Oscar Wilde and John Keats. When I read these poets I love to feel all the emotions that are possible within the human spectrum. When Anne Sexton writes, I feel a lot of these emotions come to life again through not only her writing style and not only her descriptions but even as far as the sentence structure and the lengths of the poems. Some of the shorter ones being more immediate to the feeling and the drawn out, long and everlasting sentences becoming a part of some bigger system of life. Her poetry is some of the greatest poetry to ever be written in the English Language.

Each poem is something personal with even parts of Anne Sexton’s private life mentioned within the text including her visits to her doctor for Bipolar Disorder. In her poem about her doctor and their meetings, there is a serious sense of self that harkens to her later, mid-1970s suicide:

“You, Doctor Martin, walk from breakfast to madness. Late August, I speed through the antiseptic tunnel where the moving dead still talk of pushing their bones against the trust of cure. And I am queen of this summer hotel or the laughing bee on a stalk of death. We stand in broken lines and wait while they unlock the door and count us at the frozen gates of dinner. The shibboleth is spoken and we move to gravy in our smock of smiles. We chew in rows, our plates scratch and whine like chalk.”

Apart from that, we have the shorter and more immediate poems in which the verses are cut into sentences with many phrases and the rhythm is disturbed - slightly more effective towards someone who is suffering with something that they cannot put in its place:

“Imagine it. A radio playing and everyone here was crazy. I liked and danced in a circle. Music pours over the sense and in a funny way music sees more than I. I mean it remembers better; remembered the first night here. It was the strangles cold of November; even the stars were strapped in the sky and that moon too bright forking through the bars to stick me with a singing in the head I have forgotten all the rest.”

I feel like whilst I am reading this poet, I am experiencing every single switch she is trying to flick on the light as she moves into recovery - but every now and again there is a power cut and the switch cuts off entirely. These poems are littered around the lighter ones and often get very, very dark. It is something that I adore about Anne Sexton and her poetry.

In conclusion, I would highly suggest that anyone who enjoys the older, more human and even more agonising in emotion - confessional poetry, Anne Sexton is probably the next poet that you want to get into if you are not already into her. Apart from the odd poem where she seems to describe Sylvia Plath’s death like a teenage girl from the late 2010s who has listened to one too many Lana Del Rey songs, the other poems of her experience, her life and her writings are pretty awesome to say the least. They will blow you away.