It sold, it became prize-winning genius, but the women kept on dying. The term 'madness' undermines, yet confessional poetry written by women was anything but submissive or unhinged. A read of Ted Hughes' 'Birthday Letters' implicates him, a male implicit in his own 'hysteria'. But for now, Anne Sexton.


For months my hand had been sealed off
in a tin box. Nothing was there but subway railings.
Perhaps it is bruised, I thought,
and that is why they have locked it up
But when I looked in it lay there quietly.
You could tell time by this, I thought,
like a clock, by its five knuckles
and the thin underground veins.
It lay there like an unconscious woman
fed by tubes she knew not of.

Taken from 'The Touch' by Anne Sexton. A trademark use of simile 'like'; a bold, confessional, unfussy gem.