by Jessica Schneider

Created on: July 12, 2009

Anne Sexton is a very good poet whose first few books, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, All My Pretty Ones, and Transformations contain most of her best work. She is a poet who proves that it's not what you say, but how it is said in poetry that matters most.

Sexton, at her best, is technically sound, rhythmic, and has unique turns of phrases that leave one surprised. She is able to mix the personal with the factual, invent narrative, and is able to choose just the appropriate word to leave the reader feeling raw.

Poems about death, menstruation, alcoholism, lesbianism, and depression were just not written in her time, (1928-1974) and if they were, such was considered "taboo." Now we can't seem to get rid of them. How many poems about suicide, depression, rape and assorted rants have sprung from the likeness of Sexton and flood the Internet today?

But Sexton proves that any subject can be tackled if one tackles it well. So on to the poem:

The Abortion

Somebody who should have been born
is gone.

Just as the earth puckered its mouth,
each bud puffing out from its knot,
I changed my shoes, and then drove south.

Up past the Blue Mountains, where
Pennsylvania humps on endlessly,
wearing, like a crayoned cat, its green hair,

its roads sunken in like a gray washboard;
where, in truth, the ground cracks evilly,
a dark socket from which the coal has poured,

Somebody who should have been born
is gone.

the grass as bristly and stout as chives,
and me wondering when the ground would break,
and me wondering how anything fragile survives;

up in Pennsylvania, I met a little man,
not Rumpelstiltskin, at all, at all...
he took the fullness that love began.

Returning north, even the sky grew thin
like a high window looking nowhere.
The road was as flat as a sheet of tin.

Somebody who should have been born
is gone.

Yes, woman, such logic will lead
to loss without death. Or say what you meant,
you coward...this baby that I bleed.

This is an outstanding poem. There are no real flaws, and the language is poignant and abrupt. One could argue that the italics are a bit much and that the line "Somebody who should have been born/ is gone" is a bit melodramatic, but the line itself is not so bad that it detracts from what's good.

Keeping that in mind, look at this line-by-line. The title works well. It is direct and plays off the description. Had this poem been just a graphic description of an abortion itself, this title would not have worked. But

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