TO BEDLAM AND PART WAY BACK

This sequence of poems tells the painful and dramatic story of a girl's unhappy love affair, the birth of an illegitimate child, a cure in a mental institute, and the resumption of her life with her mother and the child. The poems are skillful, exact and relentlessly realistic. Their impact is very strong. It is fair to assume that while this is not an exact life experience, there is a basic groundwork of related situations. Anne Sexton's poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the Hudson Review, the Yale Review, etc. She has held a Robert Frost Fellowship, and is now married and living with her husband and two children in a small Massachusetts town. So great is her skill in handling emotions and relating them in words that one can only hope from now on that she will use her talents on less morbid aspects of life and with more affirmation. For hers is a talent to be noted.