Product Description

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 highly engaging 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. 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. Stone Milk is her 14th collection, her first since "Poems 1955-2005".

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #117382 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 72 pages

Review
While Anne Stevenson is most certainly, and rightly, regarded as one of the 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

One of the most important poets active in England today... she presents us 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

Her knowledge of botany, ornithology and other natural sciences is 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

About the Author
ANNE STEVENSON was born in Cambridge, England, in 1933, of American parents, and grew up in New England and Michigan. She studied music, European literature and history at the University of Michigan, returning later to read English and publishing the first critical study of Elizabeth Bishop. After several transatlantic switches, she settled in Britain in 1964, and has since lived in Cambridge, Scotland, Oxford, the Welsh Borders and latterly in North Wales and Durham. She has held many literary fellowships, and was the inaugural winner of Britain's biggest literary prize, the Northern Rock Foundation Writer's Award, in 2002. As well as her numerous collections of poetry, Anne Stevenson has published a biography of Sylvia Plath (1989), a book of essays, Between the Iceberg and the Ship (1998) and two critical studies of Elizabeth Bishop's work, most recently Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop (Bloodaxe, 2006). Her latest poetry books are Poems 1955-2005 (2005) and Stone Milk (2007), both from Bloodaxe.