The Awful Rowing Toward God [Paperback]

Anne Sexton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1975

From Wikipedia: Sexton's eighth collection of poetry is entitled The Awful Rowing Toward God. The title came from her meeting with a Roman Catholic priest who, although unwilling to administer last rites, told her "God is in your typewriter." This gave the poet the desire and willpower to continue living and writing. The Awful Rowing Toward God and The Death Notebooks are among her final works and both centre on the theme of dying.

Product Details

• Paperback: 86 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co; 1st edition (March 1975)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 039520366X
• ISBN-13: 978-0395203668
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,304,499 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars painful, but of great value, January 29, 2002

By 

NotATameLion (Michigan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Awful Rowing Toward God (Hardcover)

What to make of this sorid little book of verse? Its like watching someone disembowel themselves, draw up a schematic of what they should "really" look like, and then try, like Humpty Dumpty, to put themselves back together again.

Yet, somewhere here Anne Sexton reaches for something a little further from (and at the same time closer to) herself...namely, God. And that is what these poems are: Sexton wrestling with her God. A brief taste of what this text is like (from "The Sickness Unto Death" which is one of my favorite poems contained in the book)--

"I who was a house full of bowel movement,
I who was a defaced altar,
I who wanted to crawl toward God
could not move nor eat bread.

So I ate myself,
bite by bite,
and the tears washed me,
wave after cowardly wave,
swallowing canker after canker
and Jesus stood over me looking down
and He laughed to find me gone,
and put His mouth to mine
and gave me His air."

There is much to meditate on within the pages of "The Awful Rowing Toward God." When it comes to matters such as spiritual suffering, seeking, and pain, Mrs. Sexton seems to have had some experience. No doubt, this will not be everyone's cup of tea. Nevertheless, there is much of value here.

That is why I recommend this book.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Suffocating anguish and bursts of joy, June 3, 2003

By 

Pieter "Toypom" (Johannesburg) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Awful Rowing Toward God (Hardcover)

Anne Sexton's final battles with her personal demons are documented here and it does not make for easy reading. The book opens with the poem Rowing and ends with The Rowing Endeth and inbetween are extraordinarily powerful poems about life, death, despair, the suicidal impulsive and mercifully about love too. Referring to herself as Ms Dog, the author very honestly examines her psyche in poems like The Civil War, The Room Of My Life and The Witch's Life, a poem that continues a theme established by Her Kind in the first volume To Bedlam And Part Way Back and continued through The Black Art in All My Pretty Ones. A poem like Courage overflows with hurt but has a transcendent quality too and the same duality or conflict becomes very clear in the poem After Auschwitz, where she declares: "Man ... / .../ is not a temple/but an outhouse", proceeding to curse mankind, before concluding with: "I say these things aloud./ I beg the Lord not to hear." The Poet Of Ignorance is painful to read as the arresting image of an indestructible crab gripping the poet's heart becomes a metaphor for mental pain. This oppressive image is reiterated in The Dead Heart, where the tongue did the killing, a theme more delicately investigated in the next poem, Words. The following one, The Sickness Unto Death, must be one of the bleakest poems in the English language in its seemingly casual wrestling with evil and utter despair. The line "My body became a side of mutton/and despair roamed the slaughterhouse" perhaps best encapsulates the unrelenting torment. Mercifully, poems like Welcome Morning - a description of a burst of domestic joy - and The Big Heart - where the "fury of love" for friends and family rushes into her heart, show the other side of Sexton's intensity of feeling. The Awful Rowing Toward God was the last book to be arranged by the author herself and is not recommended for the fragile reader. It reflects the agonizing search for meaning that is so universal to the individual consciousness. But perhaps because of the intensity, some of the musical rhythm of her work from especially the two aforementioned books is missing here. There is still the conversational style, but it would appear that the large crab gripping Sexton's heart was squeezing very hard here, suffocating all but the most unquenchable outbursts of joy like Welcome Morning.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Suffocating anguish and bursts of joy, January 4, 2008

By 

Pieter "Toypom" (Johannesburg) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

Anne Sexton's final battles with her personal demons are documented here and it does not make for easy reading. The book opens with the poem Rowing and ends with The Rowing Endeth. In between are extraordinarily powerful poems about life, death, despair, the suicidal impulsive and mercifully about love too.

Referring to herself as Ms Dog, the author very honestly examines her psyche in poems like The Civil War, The Room Of My Life and The Witch's Life, a poem that continues a theme established by Her Kind in the first volume To Bedlam and Part Way Back and continued through The Black Art in All My Pretty Ones.

A poem like Courage overflows with hurt but has a transcendent quality too and the same duality or conflict becomes very clear in the poem After Auschwitz, where she declares: "Man ... / .../ is not a temple/but an outhouse", proceeding to curse mankind, before concluding with: "I say these things aloud./ I beg the Lord not to hear."

The Poet Of Ignorance is painful to read as the arresting image of an indestructible crab gripping the poet's heart becomes a metaphor for mental pain. This oppressive image is reiterated in The Dead Heart, where the tongue did the killing, a theme more delicately investigated in the next poem, Words.

The following one, The Sickness Unto Death, must be one of the bleakest poems in the English language in its seemingly casual wrestling with evil and utter despair. The line "My body became a side of mutton/and despair roamed the slaughterhouse" perhaps best encapsulates the unrelenting torment.

Mercifully, poems like Welcome Morning - a description of a burst of domestic joy - and The Big Heart - where the "fury of love" for friends and family rushes into her heart, show the other side of Sexton's intensity of feeling. The Awful Rowing Toward God was the last book to be arranged by the author herself and is not recommended for the fragile reader.

It chronicles a particularly agonizing search for meaning. But perhaps because of the intensity, some of the musical rhythm of her work from especially the two aforementioned books is missing here. There is still the conversational style, but it would appear that the large crab gripping Sexton's heart was squeezing very hard here, suffocating all but the most unquenchable outbursts of joy like Welcome Morning.