autobiography of death

It was interesting to read Anne Sexton's Live or Die and Kim Hyesoon's Autobiography of Death close to one another. Both are chronological and both are steeped in death--in many reflections and relations. Hyesoon's book is unusual and fast. It's compromised of short, punchy sentences with similar structures. But what lies between these phrases are unique perspectives, including portraying death as a physical being looking upon oneself and others. I think of Sexton in "Photograph": "Your doll walks / Your doll talks / Drops its eyes inside itself / Cries till its neck turns all the way around / It may come back to life when you die..." The doll that turns its head around can be us viewing mortality, in a physically impossible fashion which this work takes that on. Hyesoon's poems are twisty, announcing the clash of choice and the inevitable: "Do you want to be a friendly corpse? / Do you want to be a scary corpse? / Do you want to become silk that ghosts kiss? / Do you want to become a sack that ghosts kick? / Every, every day is the eve of death..." Interspersed in the collection are illustrations, zany, visceral and striking, by Hyesoon's daughter Fi Jae Le. There's an interview with Hyesoon at the end of the book of writerly intentions and historical events that inform it, guided by its translator Don Mee Choi, that opens up the poems even more expansively as they lie on the page themselves: "I wanted the poems to vaporize. In other words, I wanted a ghost of collectivity to emerge from the poems." That haunting effect of "vaporizing" certainly worked on me--something I imagine is difficult to tap into as the poems float along in their repetitive, clipped phrases.

-Jeffery Berg

live or die

Anne Sexton's 1966 collection Live or Die, looks at death through a unique prism. It's a chronological collection, its dates at the end in italics, ushering in a sense of finality to each of the loose, but direct and calcified poems. Much of the book moves through abuse, death, depression with some fantastical images: "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." I may have viewed this book differently in younger years, through my own lost optical lenses, before experiencing depression. It makes a more complex read now. I do not relate to the view of Sexton's work as trite, morbid pageantry that sometimes haunts her reputation as a writer--especially in this book. In fact, I feel the book is more celebratory and cunning in the "die" than in the "live." The last lines of the book, I do not inherently trust: "I say Live, Live because of the sun, / the dream, the excitable gift." I may have read the poem "Sylvia's Death," differently before but now, I can understand the vibe of anger and envy that comes across that Plath went before she did: "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 martinis in Boston." There are so many mixtures of emotions and tones, so much concrete countered by evocative lyricism ("I think of dolls, / ... the pink skin and the serious China-blue eyes. / They came from a mysterious country / without the pang of birth, / born quietly and well") in Sexton's work here--her never "uncomplicated hymns"--that Live or Die is inherently tricky to pin down to exactness.

-Jeffery Berg

let the circle be unbroken

What I like particularly about Alison Colbert's collection of poems, Let the Circle Be Unbroken, is how of the time it was written it is. Published by Women Writing Press in 1976 and with poems dated between 1970-1974, Colbert addresses topical subjects of the era including protests against Nixon and the Vietnam War. These poems, mostly distinctly-set in the city, are written in a way that feels immediate. They also address concerns of female artists. In "Anne Sexton a Suicide," there's a push-and-pull, repetitive nature in the poem of praise and also hope to move past "women famous for violence of poetry, selling self-hatred." "The circle" becomes a place for women to "sit upon the ground and tell sad tales about the death of queens." 

Perhaps the most potent pieces are towards the end which are elegies for her brother who died in an car accident. That push-and-pull continues here as well in the vacillating between the tragedy itself and the mundane objects that surround it: bills for the plot, clergy gratuities, limos.

I picked up this tiny, teal paperback, with its plain cover and an open-faced, grinning Colbert on the back, second-hand in Provincetown. I like finding books like this, especially when the poems are as skillfully rendered as these--books that belong to another time but still feel alive.


-Jeffery Berg

a poem by anne sexton

The Truth the Dead Know


For my Mother, born March 1902, died March 1959
and my Father, born February 1900, died June 1959


Gone, I say and walk from church,
refusing the stiff procession to the grave,
letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.
It is June. I am tired of being brave.

We drive to the Cape. I cultivate
myself where the sun gutters from the sky,
where the sea swings in like an iron gate
and we touch. In another country people die.

My darling, the wind falls in like stones
from the whitehearted water and when we touch
we enter touch entirely. No one's alone.
Men kill for this, or for as much.

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes
in the stone boats. They are more like stone
than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse
to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.


-Anne Sexton

the waiting head

The Waiting Head

If I really am walking with ordinary habit
past the same rest home on the same local street
and see another waiting head at that upper front window,
just as she would always sit,
watching for anyone from her wooden seat,
then anything can be true. I only know
how each night she wrote in her leather books
that no one came. Surely I remember the hooks
of her fingers curled on mine, though even now
will not admit the times I did avoid this street,
where she lived on and on like a bleached fig
and forgot us anyhow;
visiting the pulp of her kiss, bending to repeat
each favor, trying to comb out her mossy wig
and forcing love to last. Now she is always dead
and the leather books are mine. Today I see the head
move, like some pitted angel, in that high window.
What is the waiting head doing? It looks the same.
Will it lean forward as I turn to go?
I think I hear it call to me below

but no one came no one came

-Anne Sexton