Beautiful Writing

I've been reading some beautiful things lately. Yesterday, I looked up some Anne Sexton poems, because the fairy tale poems in her book Transformations are some of my all time favorites, and came across some poems of hers that I'd never read before, like this one:

Her Kind

have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.

~Anne Sexton

And then, while reading The Trumpet of the Swan to the boys at bedtime, I came across this phrase:

"In midmorning, when the sun had gained the sky..."

and I honest-to-god thought, "How beautiful. No one writes like this anymore," and felt incredibly blessed to be able to share those words with my children.

I recently (re)joined PaperBackSwap and just today received a book that I have been searching for for ages: Precious Bane. I caught the tale end of a BBC or PBS version of it when I was about twelve and so sought out the book and loved it. I remember talking with my ninth grade Chemistry teacher about it--she'd said that it was her favorite book. That was probably the only thing I was ever enthusiastic about in Chemistry class. I am going to crawl into bed and into Prue Sarn's world. Into Mary Webb's beautiful words.