SOURCE: Ringold, Francine. Review of Letters from Maine and At Seventy. World Literature Today 59, no. 4 (autumn 1985): 597-98.

In the following review, Ringold lauds the vitality and clarity of the poems in Letters from Maine as well as the entries in her journal At Seventy.

In a year of what seems to be the celebration of the older writer—the eighty-eight-year-old Helen Hooven Santmyer's novel And Ladies of the Club and the seventy-three-year-old Harriet Doerr's book The Stones of Ibarra head the list of “discoveries” in 1984-85—let us pay tribute to May Sarton, one of the most vigorous voices of our century, who continues a distinguished career in letters into her seventies and beyond. Sarton, a clear disciple of the romantic tradition, makes poems “out of nothing, out of loss.” The best of the new poems in Letters from Maine, her fourteenth volume of verse, ring with the...