Swift Hour opens with an epigraph from a Leonard Cohen song, “I hope you’re keeping some kind of record.” Like Cohen, Sexton is looking for the crack in everything that lets the light in, but even more urgent is the recording of these moments. Life is quickly passing, but along the way, relics are harvested for safekeeping.
Sexton is a poet in search of shadows as well as light. Her explorations range from the grieving mothers of the Disappeared of Argentina, the censorship of Anna Akmatova, to Ghandi’s ashes being scattered into the Ganges. With surrealist twists, her poems capture how incongruous images of memory can redeem the pain of our past. Sexton’s poems of marriage and motherhood explore the mythical possibilities of relationships—her daughter conjures Persephone in the grocery aisle and a man and woman on a Greyhound bus suddenly become Orpheus and Eurydice. Her work reminds us how in some ways myth and knowledge itself help us to navigate through the shadows toward the light.
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Award: Adrienne Bond Award for Poetry
2013
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