bookmate game
Books
Anne Sexton

Live or Die

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize: A gripping poetry collection mapping the thorny journey from madness to hope
With her emotionally raw and deeply resonant third collection, Live or Die, Anne Sexton confirmed her place among the most celebrated poets of the twentieth century. Sexton described the volume, which depicts a fictionalized version of her struggle with mental illness, as “a fever chart for a bad case of melancholy.” From the halls of a psychiatric hospital—“the scene of the disordered scenes” in “Flee on Your Donkey”—to a child’s playroom—“a graveyard full of dolls” in “Those Times . . .”—these gripping poems offer profound insight on the agony of depression and the staggering acts of courage and faith required to emerge from its depths.
Along with other confessional poets like Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell, Sexton was known for grappling with intimate subjects traditionally considered taboo for poetry such as motherhood, menstruation, and drug dependence. Live or Die features these topics in candid and unflinching detail, as Sexton represents the full experience of being alive—and a woman—as few poets have before. Through bold images and startlingly precise language, Sexton explores the broad spectrum of human emotion ranging from desperate despair to unfettered hope.
70 printed pages
Original publication
2016
Publication year
2016
Have you already read it? How did you like it?
👍👎

Quotes

  • Evelina Todorovahas quoted2 years ago
    SUICIDE NOTE

    You speak to me of narcissism but I reply that it is a matter of my life … Artaud

    At this time let me somehow bequeath all the leftovers to my daughters and their daughters … Anonymous

    Better,

    despite the worms talking to

    the mare’s hoof in the field;

    better,

    despite the season of young girls

    dropping their blood;

    better somehow

    to drop myself quickly

    into an old room.

    Better (someone said)

    not to be born

    and far better

    not to be born twice

    at thirteen

    where the boardinghouse,

    each year a bedroom,

    caught fire.

    Dear friend,

    I will have to sink with hundreds of others

    on a dumbwaiter into hell.

    I will be a light thing.

    I will enter death

    like someone’s lost optical lens.

    Life is half enlarged.

    The fish and owls are fierce today.

    Life tilts backward and forward.

    Even the wasps cannot find my eyes.

    Yes,

    eyes that were immediate once.

    Eyes that have been truly awake,

    eyes that told the whole story—

    poor dumb animals.

    Eyes that were pierced,

    little nail heads,

    light blue gunshots.

    And once with

    a mouth like a cup,

    clay colored or blood colored,

    open like the breakwater

    for the lost ocean

    and open like the noose

    for the first head.

    Once upon a time

    my hunger was for Jesus.

    O my hunger! My hunger!

    Before he grew old

    he rode calmly into Jerusalem

    in search of death.

    This time

    I certainly

    do not ask for understanding

    and yet I hope everyone else

    will turn their heads when an unrehearsed fish jumps

    on the surface of Echo Lake;

    when moonlight,

    its bass note turned up loud,

    hurts some building in Boston,

    when the truly beautiful lie together.

    I think of this, surely,

    and would think of it far longer

    if I were not … if I were not

    at that old fire.

    I could admit

    that I am only a coward

    crying me me me

    and not mention the little gnats, the moths,

    forced by circumstance

    to suck on the electric bulb.

    But surely you know that everyone has a death,

    his own death,

    waiting for him.

    So I will go now

    without old age or disease,

    wildly but accurately,

    knowing my best route,

    carried by that toy donkey I rode all these years,

    never asking, “Where are we going?”

    We were riding (if I’d only known)

    to this.

    Dear friend,

    please do not think

    that I visualize guitars playing

    or my father arching his bone.

    I do not even expect my mother’s mouth.

    I know that I have died before—

    once in November, once in June.

    How strange to choose June again,

    so concrete with its green breasts and bellies.

    Of course guitars will not play!

    The snakes will certainly not notice.

    New York City will not mind.

    At night the bats will beat on the trees,

    knowing it all,

    seeing what they sensed all day.

    June 1965
  • Evelina Todorovahas quoted2 years ago
    WANTING TO DIE

    Since you ask, most days I cannot remember.

    I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage.

    Then the almost unnameable lust returns.

    Even then I have nothing against life.

    I know well the grass blades you mention,

    the furniture you have placed under the sun.

    But suicides have a special language.

    Like carpenters they want to know which tools.

    They never ask why build.

    Twice I have so simply declared myself,

    have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy,

    have taken on his craft, his magic.

    In this way, heavy and thoughtful,

    warmer than oil or water,

    I have rested, drooling at the mouth-hole.

    I did not think of my body at needle point.

    Even the cornea and the leftover urine were gone.

    Suicides have already betrayed the body.

    Still-born, they don’t always die,

    but dazzled, they can’t forget a drug so sweet

    that even children would look on and smile.

    To thrust all that life under your tongue!—

    that, all by itself, becomes a passion.

    Death’s a sad bone; bruised, you’d say,

    and yet she waits for me, year after year,

    to so delicately undo an old wound,

    to empty my breath from its bad prison.

    Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet,

    raging at the fruit, a pumped-up moon,

    leaving the bread they mistook for a kiss,

    leaving the page of the book carelessly open,

    something unsaid, the phone off the hook

    and the love, whatever it was, an infection.

    February 3, 1964
  • Evelina Todorovahas quoted2 years ago
    SYLVIA’S DEATH

    for Sylvia Plath

    O Sylvia, Sylvia,

    with a dead box of stones and spoons,

    with two children, two meteors

    wandering loose in the tiny playroom,

    with your mouth into the sheet,

    into the roofbeam, into the dumb prayer,

    (Sylvia, Sylvia,

    where did you go

    after you wrote me

    from Devonshire

    about raising potatoes

    and keeping bees?)

    what did you stand by,

    just how did you lie down into?

    Thief!—

    how did you crawl into,

    crawl down alone

    into the death I wanted so badly and for so long,

    the death we said we both outgrew,

    the one we wore on our skinny breasts,

    the one we talked of so often each time

    we downed three extra dry martinis in Boston,

    the death that talked of analysts and cures,

    the death that talked like brides with plots,

    the death we drank to,

    the motives and then the quiet deed?

    (In Boston

    the dying

    ride in cabs,

    yes death again,

    that ride home

    with our boy.)

    O Sylvia, I remember the sleepy drummer

    who beat on our eyes with an old story,

    how we wanted to let him come

    like a sadist or a New York fairy

    to do his job,

    a necessity, a window in a wall or a crib,

    and since that time he waited

    under our heart, our cupboard,

    and I see now that we store him up

    year after year, old suicides

    and I know at the news of your death,

    a terrible taste for it, like salt.

    (And me,

    me too.

    And now, Sylvia,

    you again

    with death again,

    that ride home

    with our boy.)

    And I say only

    with my arms stretched out into that stone place,

    what is your death

    but an old belonging,

    a mole that fell out

    of one of your poems?

    (O friend,

    while the moon’s bad,

    and the king’s gone,

    and the queen’s at her wit’s end

    the bar fly ought to sing!)

    O tiny mother,

    you too!

    O funny duchess!

    O blonde thing!

    February 17, 1963
fb2epub
Drag & drop your files (not more than 5 at once)