Anne Stevenson

Recounts the troubled life of the American poet and uses her unpublished letters and journals to depict the feelings that led her to suicide

A Life of Sylvia Plath

Bitter Fame

Elizabeth Bishop is one of the greatest and most influential American poets of the 20th century. First published in hardback in 1998, "Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop" is a highly illuminating reader's guide written by another leading poet, which makes full use of the letters Elizabeth Bishop wrote to Anne Stevenson from Brazil in the 1960s. Anne Stevenson is a major American and British poet who has published many books of poetry, including her "Poems 1955-2005" in 2005. Her other books include "Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath" (1989), the first critical study of "Elizabeth Bishop" (1966), and a book of essays, "Between the Iceberg and the Ship" (1998). Each of her five chapters looks at a different aspect of Bishop's art. "In the Waiting Room" links her life-long search for self-placement to her unsettled childhood. "Time's Andromeda" shows how a youthful fascination with 17th-century baroque art ripened, in the 1930s, into a unique brand of metaphysical surrealism. "Living with the Animals" considers ways in which Bishop, like Walt Whitman, deserted the literary mode of the fable to give autonomy and authority to natural creatures. Two final chapters focus on the poet's Darwinian acceptance of evolutionary change and her steady look at the 'geographical mirror' that in her later work replaced the figure of the looking-glass as an emblem of imagination. "Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop" represents a view of her work Bishop herself would have recognised and approved. A chronology and a set of maps serve as practical guides to the poet's life and travels.

Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop

Poems 1955-2005

The poems of Stone Milk address the way the written word preserves yet distorts the lives depending on it for fame or survival. Anne Stevenson's new collection opens with "A Lament for the Makers", an experimental sequence based on medieval dream poetry that plays with a Dante-inspired yet modern, scientific vision of an underworld of poets. This is followed by a series of shorter poems, mostly related to aging and the prospect (even the comfort) of dying. "The Myth of Medea" ends the book on a note both stoic and merry, despite its frank look at the reality of death. Stevenson rewrites the myth as an 'entertainment' to be set to music - her own original take on how ancient, classical stories are reinterpreted by societies that inherit and retell them.

Stone Milk

Selected Poems, 1963-1973

Travelling Behind Glass

Anne Stevenson is one of the leading women poets in England. Her poetry is unusual for its great range of mood and subject matter. This is a major selection from all of her past collections, including The Fiction-Makers, a Poetry Book Society Choice.

Selected Poems, 1956-1986

A collection of poems including such works as "In the Nursery," "All Canal Boat Cruises Start Here," "Letter to Sylvia Plath," and "North Easter"

The Other House

Minute by Glass Minute

Anne Stevenson's new collection crosses many borders. While her title-poem mocks borders dividing rich nations from poor, its subtext undermines the public language of political self-justification, suggesting that the true dimensions of morality can be approached best through literature.

New & Rescued Poems

A Report from the Border

In the Orchard is not so much a collection of poems about birds as a book of memories and rare moments in which a number of familiar birds have played a spark-like role in bringing poems about. They are chiefly lyrical in character and range in time from 'Resurrection' written over fifty years ago to recent poems like 'The Bully Thrush', but they are not ordered chronologically and shouldn't be associated with events in the poet's private life. The etchings by Alan Turnbull are the result of his patient and painstaking study of each bird as it relates to the poem in which it appears.

In the Orchard

Anne Stevenson (1933-2020) was a major American and British poet. Born in Cambridge of American parents, she grew up in the States but lived in Britain for most of her adult life. Rooted in close observation of the world and acute psychological insight, her poems continually question how we see and think about the world. They are incisive as well as entertaining, marrying critical rigour with personal feeling, and a sharp wit with an original brand of serious humour. Her posthumously published Collected Poems is a remaking of Anne Stevenson's earlier Poems 1955-2005 (Bloodaxe Books, 2005), expanded to include poems from her final three books, Stone Milk (2007), Astonishment (2012) and Completing the Circle (2020), drawing on sixteen collections which are presented in their original order of publication.

Anne Stevenson: Collected Poems

Anne Stevenson's The Collected Poems brings together forty years of her best poetry, including Correspondences, Living in America, Reversals, Traveling Behind Glass, Enough of Green, Minute by Glass Minute, The Fiction Makers, and Four and a Half Dancing Men. Well known in the United States and Great Britain for the wide variety of her work and voice, Stevenson is one of the twentieth-century's most versatile and lively poets. Wise, funny, witty, and grave, Stevenson is a poet of many moods and subjects, but always preoccupied with language and its music.

The Collected Poems of Anne Stevenson, 1955-1995

A biography of the poet from New England, describing her life, accomplishments, and her suicide at thirty.

Anne Stevenson is a major American and British poet. Born in Cambridge of American parents, she grew up in the States but has lived in Britain for most of her adult life. Rooted in close observation of the world and acute psychological insight, her poems continually question how we see and think about the world. They are incisive as well as entertaining, marrying critical rigour with personal feeling, and a sharp wit with an original brand of serious humour. Poems 1955-2005 is a remaking of Anne Stevenson's earlier Collected Poems, drawing on over a dozen previous collections as well as new poems, with this book's new thematic arrangements emphasising the craft, coherence and architecture of her life's work. major poets of our period, it has never been by virtue of this or that much anthologised poem, but by the work or mind as a whole. It is not so much a matter of the odd lightning-struck tree as of an entire landscape, and that landscape is always humane, intelligent and sane, composed of both natural and rational elements, and amply furnished with patches of wit and fury, which only serve to bring out the humanity' - george szirtes, London Magazine with a complex reality where an intently sensory world inhabited by wilful resistant people is overlaid by ghosts, ideas, and spectral emissions: the historical, philosophical, and scientific - all dimensions of what obviously isn't there and yet can't be denied' - emily grosholz, Michigan Quarterly impressive, but her talent is for fusing the disciplines into an honest and humane account of our world, and expressing this through rhythm and form...She is wise without portentousness, her technique faultless and her imagination fiery, political and fresh' - carol rumens, Independent

Anne Stevenson

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