SOURCE: Earnshaw, Doris. A review of Halfway to Silence. World Literature Today 67, no. 4 (autumn 1993): 829.

In the following review, Earnshaw lauds the thematic richness and stylistic mastery of the poems in Halfway to Silence.

The eminent poet, novelist, and journal writer May Sarton, at eighty, has fashioned a moving series of poems [Halfway to Silence] chosen from her last three books. The three sections present three periods in her life: a love affair when she was sixty-five, a surge of creativity at age seventy, and a new awareness of herself as an artist. She gives this information in an author's note, along with the observation that “the lyric impulse infrequently lasts into old age.” We can only marvel at the vitality in these poems and think of portraits of other poets in old age: James Russell Lowell, Victor Hugo, and Robert Frost—the last, like Sarton, a New Hampshire...