45 Mercy Street

by Anne Sexton, Linda Gray Sexton (Editor)

The late poet's first posthumous collection combines intense self-exposure and selective description in verse accounts of personal and social experiences and concerns during the last three years of her life.

Genres: Poetry, American

113 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Anne Sexton once told a journalist that her fans thought she got better, but actually, she just became a poet. These words are characteristic of a talented poet that received therapy for years, but committed suicide in spite of this. The poetry fed her art, but it also imprisoned her in a way.

Her parents didn’t expect much of her academically, and after completing her schooling at Rogers Hall, she went to a finishing school in Boston. Anne met her husband, Kayo (Alfred Muller Sexton II), in 1948 by correspondence. Her mother advised her to elope after she thought she might be pregnant. Anne and Kayo got married in 1948 in North Carolina. After the honeymoon Kayo started working at his father-in-law’s wool business.

In 1953 Anne gave birth to her first-born, Linda Gray. Two years later Linda’s sister, Joyce Ladd, was born. But Anne couldn’t cope with the pressure of two small children over and above Kayo’s frequent absence (due to work). Shortly after Joy was born, Anne was admitted to Westwood Lodge where she was treated by the psychiatrist Dr. Martha Brunner-Orne (and six months later, her son, Dr. Martin Orne, took over). The original diagnosis was for post-natal depression, but the psychologists later decided that Anne suffered from depression of biological nature.

While she was receiving psychiatric treatment, Anne started writing poetry. It all started after another suicide attempt, when Orne came to her and told her that she still has a purpose in life. At that stage she was convinced that she could only become a prostitute. Orne showed her another talent that she had, and her first poetry appeared in print in the January of 1957. She wrote a huge amount of poetry that was published in a dozen poetry books. In 1967 she became the proud recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Live or Die (1966).

In March 1972 Anne and Kayo got divorced. After this a desperate kind of loneliness took over her life. Her addiction to pills and alcohol worsened. Without Kayo the house was very quiet, the children were at college and most of Anne’s friends were avoiding her because they could no longer sympathize with her growing problems. Her poetry started playing such a major role in her life that conflicts were written out, rather than being faced. Anne didn’t mention a word to Kayo about her intention to get divorced. He knew that she desperately needed him, but her poems, and her real feelings toward him, put it differently. Kayo talks about it in an interview as follows: “... I honestly don’t know, never have known, what her real, driving motive was in the divorce. Which is another reason why it absolutely drove me into the floor like a nail when she did it.”

On 4 October 1974 she put on her mother’s old fur coat before, glass of vodka in hand, she climbed into her car, turned the key and died of monodioxide inhalation. She once told Orne that “I feel like my mother whenever I put it [the fur coat] on”. Her oldest daughter, Linda, was appointed as literary executor and we have her to thank for the three poetry books that appeared posthumously.

Reviews

[Jamie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been randomly reading poems from Sexton's Collected Poems all summer long--I'd pick up the hefty tome and read a half-dozen or so every once in a while, remembering why I had grown so attached to Sexton in the first place. Then I realized-I hadn't read, hadn't even skimmed, any of her three 'final' collections--The Awful Rowing Toward God, 45 Mercy Street, or Words for Dr. Y--probably because I had often read about how swift her poetic decline was in her later years. I had already begun to notice that so-termed 'decline' as early as The Book of Folly, which admittedly, as a follow-up to Transformations (which I consider her best collection), did not really hold water. I should go back to it again, but I suppose that once Sexton's obsessive interest in religion took hold, I began to lose my engagement with her work. I still need a solid re-read of everything after Transformations, but I'm willing to say now that the 1-2-3 punch of Live or Die/Love Poems/Transformations represent her creative peak.

In any case, enough back story. 45 Mercy Street was published posthumously, with Linda Gray (her daughter) confessing that the poems were more or less put together as a collection, but that even Sexton herself considered them somewhat "too personal" (and I would assume, unpolished) to be published for some time. It certainly shows through the collection, which is often hit or miss in terms of quality. The collection is broken into four sections, of which two should have comprised the entirety. 'Bestiary U.S.A.' has a single poem that is wholly provocative outside of its web of support--Hornet--which imagines the hornet as a sexual assailant, fitting enough in a collection so engrossed by questions of marital and eroticized violence between men and women. Sexton's vision of the hornet leaping into "your body like a hammer" and climbing into her pubic hair from inside the toilet--these are images that hauntingly tie back to her obvious traumas in the process of divorce. I get the idea for the bestiary section, and certainly find it fascinating, but the fact remains that they don't stand on their own--only amongst themselves--and in that way, "Hornet" alone should have been salvaged. Likewise, the final section (I keep accidentally typing 'sextion'!), 'Eating the Leftovers' has a handful of powerful lines and rhymes, maybe a really strong poem in there somewhere, but does not--again--hold up without the power of the collection as a whole.

This said, both "Beginning the Hegira" and "The Divorce Papers" rival her best work at times. I'll confess that it is quite clear Sexton had become so immersed in her personal traumas and mental illness that her inner-editor was no longer as vigilant--but the nugget of genius lies beneath these poems. The eponymous poem of the collection is incredible, and her concern in that section ("Hegira") with children and their pain, and the mother's observations on a child's pain tie the series together in a way that pricks the heart, much in the way that her old work did.

Likewise, though 'The Divorce Papers' feels often as if it could have been shaved down by a few poems--or that some of the better poems, had they been hammered out just a little further, would have been jaw-droppingly amazing--there's that riveting passion for life that always shines through Sexton's pain. It's easy to dismiss her as one who simply bleeds on the page, and she is often at fault in 'The Divorce Papers' for doing just that; but somehow, you feel that she truly wanted to work through her issues. She hadn't given up just yet, and some of the visions in the poems there are absolutely frightening. There's a definite trajectory to 'The Divorce Papers'--the beginning of the dissolution, the terror and agony of being severed from someone who has been there for so long, and then the hindsight view--and incredible violence radiates from the poems. She imagines eviscerating (presumably her husband) with a bayonet, has a body made of glass, and--in one of the most fascinating poems of the entire collection, "The Love Plant" figures a sort of Invasion of the Body Snatchers physicality. Plants erupt from her body; a rose crawls from her mouth (which she spits at the passerby)--then the rose returns in the next poem as something remembered from her marriage, now an awful image.

Sexton is wonderful to ponder over when thinking in terms of body horror-but beyond the intellectual interest, you feel the sort of ripping apart at the seams she attempts to articulate here. It's often difficult to read, but as Sexton remarks in "For John, Who Begs Me Not to Enquire Further"--"Not that it was beautiful, / but that there was some sense of order there, / something worth learning in the narrow diary of my mind" (I'm paraphrasing, but it's definitely from that poem). Sexton was ever-willing to open her self up for interrogation, and often, she forged art from her personal chaos. 45 Mercy Street features many instances of this, even though it frequently falls short. If you're a Sexton fan, however, it's a must read.

[léonna marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 stars for the divorce papers, my favorite section of poems out all all of her work, especially with the context that her husband had zero idea why she suddenly wanted a divorce

"he remains, his fingers the marvel
of fourth of july sparklers,
his furious ice cream cones of licking,
remains to cool my forehead with a washcloth
when i sweat into the bathtub of his being."

[Steven Godin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read as part of the 'Complete poems'. Powerful stuff.

[Esther · Rating 5 out of 5]

Part III: The Divorce Papers is excruciating. Part IV: Eating the Leftovers -- I didn't understand it. It is manic, free-associating, deathly. But I'll never get over:

These days even the devil is getting overturned
and held up to the light like a glass of water.
-- "Cockroach"

and so much else.

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just like the majority of her later work there were a few glimmers of genius, however much of this stuff was very mediocre. I’ve just got one more collection of hers to read now and then I’m finished with all of her poetry collections.

[tiffany · Rating 4 out of 5]

II
‎
‎ ‎ ‎
Bestiary U.S.A.
‎
‎ ‎ ‎
(I look at the strangeness in them
and the naturalness they cannot help,
in order to find some virtue in the
beast in me.)

[Pearl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Five stars for the titular poem... and a bit less for the rest. You can really see, not just Sexton’s disintegration, but her limits. She didn’t finish all of her edits before her suicide, but still- the whole thing reminds me weirdly of a bird trapped in a house, just smashing words together trying to get free.

[Max Morton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love her always. Been reading this for a minute here and there. Anyone who dislikes bestiary usa takes themselves too seriously. Some of her best poems completely different than her usual shit. Divorce papers also incredible and title poem. Can’t miss in my eyes

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

45 Mercy Street


In my dream,
drilling into the marrow
of my entire bone,
my real dream,
I'm walking up and down Beacon Hill
searching for a street sign -
namely MERCY STREET.
Not there.

I try the Back Bay.
Not there.
Not there.
And yet I know the number.
45 Mercy Street.
I know the stained-glass
of the foyer,
the three flights of the house
with its parquet floors.
I know the furniture and
mother, grandmother, great-grandmother,
the servants.
I know the cupboard of Spode,
the boat of ice, solid silver,
where the butter sits in neat squares
like strange giant's teeth
on the big mahogany table.
I know it well.
Not there.

Where did you go?
45 Mercy Street,
with great-grandmother
kneeling in her whale-bone corset
and praying gently but fiercely
to the wash basin,
at five A.M.
at noon
dozing in her wiggy rocker,
grandfather taking a nip in the pantry,
grandmother pushing the bell for the downstairs maid,
and Nana rocking Mother with an oversized flower
on her forehead to cover the curl
of when she was good and when she was . . .
And where she was begat
and in a generation
the third she will beget,
me,
with the stranger's seed blooming
into the flower called Horrid.

I walk in a yellow dress
and a white pocketbook stuffed with cigarettes,
enough pills, my wallet, my keys,
and being twenty-eight, or is it forty-five?
I walk. I walk.
I hold matches at the street signs
for it is dark,
as dark as the leathery dead
and I have lost my green Ford,
my house in the suburbs,
two little kids
sucked up like pollen by the bee in me
and a husband
who has wiped off his eyes
in order not to see my inside out
and I am walking and looking
and this is no dream
just my oily life
where the people are alibis
and the street is unfindable for an
entire lifetime.

Pull the shades down -
I don't care!
Bold the door, mercy,
erase the number,
rip down my street sign,
what can it matter,
what can it matter to this cheapskate
who wants to own the past
that went out on a dead ship
and left me only with paper?

Not there.

I open my pocketbook,
as women do,
and fish swim back and forth
between the dollars and the lipstick.
I pick them out,
one by one
and throw them at the street signs,
and shoot my pocketbook
into the Charlie River.
Next I pull the dream off
and slam into the cement wall
of the clumsy calendar
I live in,
my life,
and its hauled up
notebooks.

* * *

The Money Swing, after "Babylon Revisited" by F. Scott Fitzgerald


Mother, Father,
I hold this snapshot of you,
taken, it says, in 1929
on the deck of the yawl.
Mother, Father,
so young, so hot, so jazzy,
so like Zelda and Scott
with drinks and cigarettes and turbans
and designer slacks and frizzy permanents
and all the dough,
what do you say to me now,
here at my sweaty desk in 1971?

I know the ice in your drink is senile.
I know your smile will develop a boil.
You know only that you are on top,
swinging like children on the money swing
up and over, up and over,
until even New York City lies down small.
You know that when winter comes
and the snow comes
that it won't be real snow.
If you don't want it to be snow
you just pay money.

* * *

The Risk


When a daughter tries suicide
and the chimney falls down like a drunk
and the dog chews her tail off
and the kitchen blows up its shiny kettle
and the vacuum cleaner swallows its bag
and the toilet washes itself in tears
and the bathroom scales weigh in the ghost
of the grandmother and the windows,
those sky pieces, ride out like boats
and the grass rolls down the driveway
and the mother lies down on her marriage bed
and eats up her heart like two eggs.

* * *

Where It Was At Back Then


Husband,
last night I dreamt
they cut off your hands and feet.
Husband,
you whispered to me,
Now we are both incomplete.

Husband,
I held all four
in my arms like sons and daughters.
Husband,
I bent slowly down
and washed them in magical waters.

Husband,
I placed each one
where it belonged on you.
"A miracle,"
you said and we laughed
the laugh of the well-to-do.

* * *

The Stand-Ins


In the dream
the swastika is neon
and flashes like a strobe light
into my eyes, all colours,
all vibrations
an I see the killer in him
and he turns on an oven,
an oven, an oven, an oven
and on a pie plate he sticks
in my Yellow Star
and then
then when it is ready for serving -
this dream goes off into the wings
and on stage The Cross appears,
with Jesus sticking to it
and He is breathing
and breathing
and He is breathing
and breathing
and then He speaks,
a kind of whisper,
and says . . .
This is the start.
This is the end.
This is a light.
This is a start.
I woke.
I did not know the hour,
an hour of night like thick scum
but I considered the dreams,
the two: Swastika, Crucifix,
and said: Oh well,
it doesn't belong to me,
if a cigar can be a cigar
then a dream can be a dream.
Right?
Right?
And went back to sleep
and another start.

* * *

The Consecrating Mother


I stand before the sea
and it rolls and rolls in its green blood
saying, "Do not give up one god
for I have a handful."
The trade winds blew
in their twelve-fingered reversal
and I simple stood on the beach
while the ocean made a cross of salt
and hung up its drowned
and they cried Deo Deo.
The ocean offered them up in the vein of its might.
I wanted to share this
bu I stood alone with a pink scarecrow.
The ocean steamed in and out,
the ocean gasped upon the shore
bu I could not define her,
I could not name her mood, her locked-up faces.
Far off she rolled and rolled
like a woman in labour
and I thought of those who had crossed her,
in antiquity, in nautical trade, in slavery, in war.
I wondered how she has borne those bulwarks.
She should be entered skin to skin,
and put on like one's first or last cloth,
entered like kneeling your way into church,
descending into that ascension,
though she be slick as olive oil,
as she climbs each wave like an embezzler of white.
The big deep knows the law as it wears its gray hat,
though the ocean comes in its destiny,
with its one hundred lips,
and in moonlight she comes in her nudity,
flashing breasts made of milk-water,
flashing buttocks made of unkillable lust,
and at night when you enter her
you shin like a neon soprano.

I am that clumsy human
on the shore
love you, coming, coming,
going,
and wish to put my thumb on you
like The Song of Solomon.

[Miguel Vega · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought this collection to be interesting. My favorite section was the "Divorce Papers", with "Bestiary U.S.A." being my least favorite, and a rather difficult section for me to get through.

[Rena Sherwood · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this when I was either a freshman or sophomore at community college. However, it wasn't a part of any class curriculum. No, I read this because Anne Sexton was one of Peter Gabriel's favorite poets. He even wrote a killer song inspired by her poetry called "Mercy Street". In his 1987 tour, he had a picture of Anne Sexton and one of her poems in his tour book.

This is a difficult book. It's the kind of poetry that people make fun of. I used to be into this kind of deep poetry when I was a teenager, but I just can't deal with it now in my 50s. I have enough problems as it is. I don't need Sexton's head games. And she certainly had a lot of them, considering all of these poems were written a few years before she committed suicide.

Yes, she's one of those poets. She suffered from major depression for most of her life. So have I. This is one reason that I now stay away from her. In this book, she's been throttled by her depression. Now, I've read that some people with depression found great comfort in Anne Sexton's poetry because she knew what real depression was like. That hasn't happened with me. I now usually feel worse after reading her -- specifically this book.

The poems are divided into sections. My favorite section, and perhaps the most accessible, is the second section, Beastiary U.S.A., which is about animals ... and how they relate to her. In "Racoon", she uses the word "coon", but, trust me -- she means raccoons.

If you are a Peter Gabriel fan, you should give Anne Sexton a try. And yes, in the poem "45 Mercy Street", she is, indeed, looking for Mercy Street. It's currently up on The Open Library.

There are some real sharp gems here, but you really have to hunt for them, such as the final two lines from "Cockroach":

These days even the devil is getting overturned
And held up to the light like a glass of water.

[Natalie · Rating 3 out of 5]

i would say a 3.5 rather than a 3 stars. the poems at the beginning weren’t my favorite. this collection is divided into four parts and i didn’t really start liking any of them until the middle of part three. i really liked it when she said, “one learns not the blab about all this except to yourself or the typewriter keys who tell no one until they get brave and crawl off onto the printed page.” i think i really like anne sexton so much because she really doesn’t hold anything or any emotion back and i would like to be and write like that eventually. one day. but at the moment i am blabbing about everything to just myself. my favorite poems were talking to sheep, keeping the city, bat, where it was at back then, despair, divorce, waking alone, when the glass of my body broke, the break away, the love plant, killing the love, the inventory of goodbye, the lost lie, end middle beginning, cigarettes and whiskey and wild wild women, and the passion of the mad rabbit

[Maslan's hierarchy of reads · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. I loved this collection. I read it ravenously over the course of a night, and then for the past few days, I have reread the collection more slowly. It will keep you up. It is haunting. At times, the metaphoric metamorphoses of body feel monstrous or bordering on the grotesque. And yet, these images never feel superfluous or outsized. Despite its grand trip in images their mutilated counterparts, the poems feel very based in a reality, materiality. Containing the sort of lines that have you think to yourself : "that's absolutely right!" Not about it all of course the poems are written right before Sexton's suicide. I guess that was why I liked it so much: all these quotidian moments and practices get translated into these grotesque terms. There is a sort of catharsis in the poems that as she converts daily life into monstrous scenes, she also excises them. There are stanzas that are particularly great folded into poems that as a whole are a bit schizophrenic in their poetic excitement Within each poem, even the ones devoted to an animal or insect, one finds the same sense of hegira ("a journey or trip especially when undertaken as a means of escaping from an undesirable or dangerous environment; or as a means of arriving at a highly desirable destination"). Each image is subverted and changed towards or away from something. The image of the fish begins in the first poem "45 Mercy Street" : " I open up my pocket book,/as women do, ad fish swim back and forth/ between the dollars and the lipstick./I pick each out one by one/ and throw them at the street signs..." These different images of the fish and yellowness as things that are removed, violently, reoccurs and is what I have continued to think about most perhaps. I especially loved "Talking to Sheep". The move from "Divorce" to "Walking Alone" is staggering. Actually, it all is. The sections "Divorce Papers" and "Eating the Leftovers" especially so, but they are so great and so dramatic it is hard to name specific poems. Once you begin, you feel sucked in to a feverish reading that blends many of them together I will say the animal and insect poems surprised me; they are less dramatic but quite interesting.

[Drew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Even the worst verse of Anne Sexton is pretty darn good. This posthumous collection, which oddly shares most of its name with her one play and her daughter's memoir, neither burnishes nor tarnishes her sterling literary legacy. The "Bestiary U.S.A." section feels like a tantalizing but half-finished exploration while "The Divorce Papers" could benefit from either a reordering or some discards. Even so, this lady poet can still knock your socks off with poems like "Divorce, Thy Name Is Woman," "Where It Was at Back Then," and the sprawling "The Break Away."

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall it lacks AS' final arrangements and close editing. But some of these poems are very powerful.
When the Glass of Body Broke is very strong like Bayonet, Falling Dolls, and Cigarettes and Whiskey and Wild, Wild Women. She's starting to enter Bukowski area.

[Corey · Rating 5 out of 5]

The older I get the more Anne Sexton speaks to me. She's fearless, a little scary because she cuts deep.
But she says things like this:
"One learns not to blab about all this
except to yourself or the typewriter keys
who tell no one until they get brave
and crawl off onto the printed page."

[Sara Sheikhi · Rating 2 out of 5]

These poems did not speak to me...

[Shreyashree · Rating 2 out of 5]

I felt that this collection of poetry was unedited and therefore there was a lack of smoothness that any kind of poetry demands.

[faith adams-michaels · Rating 4 out of 5]

the divorce papers and the poems after are five stars. the poems before are three. so i averaged.

[Atticus Dalton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anne Sexton's work is so powerful I love it.

[Jam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Anne you can’t say things like that…

[Matthew O'Connor · Rating 4 out of 5]

oh anne..... "I love you the way a ripe artichoke tastes" seriously.... extremely sad you killed yourself but not surprised after reading this collection.. much love <3

[Omama. · Rating 3 out of 5]

45 Mercy Street charts Anne Sexton's poetic growth and the events of her life from 1971 through 1974.
The manuscript was still unfinished when she died. But her voice didn't cease with her death. The book's first page is "Beginning the Hegira" which translates as:

hegira (hi-ji're). noun. A journey or trip especially when
undertaken as a means of escaping from an undesirable or
dangerous environment; or as a means of arriving at a
highly desirable destination.

"All right!
I'll take you along on the trip
where for so many years
my arms have been speechless"

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

These were okay. I don't think that they were all in what would have been their final forms, though, which was a strange experience. I can't know for certain, but there were many places where I felt like poems would have been edited a bit further, and AS was always a very fervent revisionist. Good collection, though.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Probably a 3.5
I always feel uneasy reading work that was not approved by the writer herself. This is no exception, especially as it doesn't have the same emotional punch as her fully edited works. Nevertheless, the frenetic pace of these poems is worth taking the time to read and re-read. My favourite is The Divorce Papers collection.

[Raul Abreu]

Sexton #9, o penúltimo, o primeiro póstumo.
Acho que vai ser muito difícil superar o Awful Rowing — talvez por isso não tenha gostado tanto deste aqui. Ou foi por conta da dissertação, vai saber.
A última parte foi a melhor, de longe. Ótimos bookends aqui, o primeiro e o último poema foram meus favoritos.

[Esthër · Rating 5 out of 5]

La tercera parte, 'Los documentos del divorcio', me dejó sin aliento, su dolor se convirtió en mío, una empatía que en este momento agradecí infinito.

"Nací como una niña de cristal y nadie me cogió
salvo para quitarme el polvo.
Él me ha cogido y me ha lamido viva"

[Christine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Loved the second section (the Bestiary poems), but Sexton really lost me in the final section of poems.

[Kelsey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoyed these poems. They are refreshingly accessible and full of provocative imagery--makes me want to read her finished collections.

[Pt Bunch · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazingly self aware book of poems. Stunningly vulnerable and poignantly authentic.