SOURCE: "Strange Monsters," in Belles Lettres: A Review of Books by Women, Vol. 9, No. 3, July, 1994, p. 37.

[In the following review, Lockett offers praise for Sarton's Collected Poems (1930–1993).]

Even the most devout reader of May Sarton's work may be relatively unfamiliar with her poetry. But Sarton, who has published 16 volumes of verse to date, considers herself a poet first and foremost. Thus, Collected Poems (1930–1993) is essential reading.

Carolyn G. Heilbrun on Sarton's fidelity to the conventions of genre:

Little has so marked contemporary literature as the melding of genres. Once the "certainties" of a steadier time were revealed to rest upon arguable assumptions, the slippage of genre was inevitable. Today biography and fiction are met together; novel and poetry, like righteousness and peace, have kissed each other. Ambiguity dilutes taxonomy. We now read "it" because it is by Lessing or Pynchon, Mailer or Millett, not because we know precisely...