[In Selected Poems of May Sarton], the poems shift between established forms and free verse, the best being the least technically tight. When subject and technique converge, one discovers a work that is classic and contemporary, a "passion of the word."… Sarton has mastered the quality of timeless poetry, to observe and reflect at the same instant. She can look at herself objectively in "Gestalt at Sixty," examine her motives for seeking solitude, and accept age and death. Rilke's shadow falls on many poems, religious one like "Annunciation" and explicitly in "At Muzat." Sarton has an eye for the ridiculous in "Franz, a Goose" ("I am the goose of geese") and a sense of the tragic in poems on her father's death, the assassination of Martin Luther King, the Vietnam War. She favors feminine myths: Kali, Medusa, Athena, and Aphrodite, and she handles people better than nature in...