Completing the Circle
Published on 27. February 2020
Book
Paperback/Softback
80 pages
978-1-78037-498-7 (ISBN)
Description
Anne Stevenson's Completing the Circle is a swansong collection of moving elegies and celebrations written in her 80s during the early decades of what she calls in her preface, 'a newly transformed, already terrifying century'. Most of these poems look back on her past from 'the viewpoint of a bewildered survivor facing up to the realities of time passing and beloved contemporaries dying'. In common with much of her work - and fittingly for this wide-ranging book of remembrance - she manages to maintain a tone that is serious without being funereal, acquiescent without indulging in confessional despair, keeping personal self-pity at bay with a characteristic detachment that can quietly slip into wit. The title-poem, while it owes a debt to Rilke, essentially expresses the poet's own long-considered belief that 'death naturally and rightly completes the cycle we recognise and accept as life'.
Completing the Circle is Anne Stevenson's 16th collection, her third since her much praised Bloodaxe retrospective Poems 1955-2005. It follows two other late collections, Stone Milk (2007) and Astonishment (2012).
Completing the Circle is Anne Stevenson's 16th collection, her third since her much praised Bloodaxe retrospective Poems 1955-2005. It follows two other late collections, Stone Milk (2007) and Astonishment (2012).
Reviews / Votes
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 *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Tyne and Wear
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 138 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-78037-498-7 (9781780374987)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Person
Anne Stevenson (1933-2020) was born in Cambridge, England, 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, living in Cambridge, Scotland, Oxford, the Welsh Borders, and latterly in North Wales and Durham.
She held many literary fellowships, and was the inaugural winner of Britain's biggest literary prize, the Northern Rock Foundation Writer's Award, in 2002. In 2007 she was awarded three major prizes in the USA: the $200,000 Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award for Poetry by the Lannan Foundation of Santa Fe, a Neglected Masters Award from the Poetry Foundation of Chicago and The Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry from The Sewanee Review in Tennessee. In 2008, The Library of America published Anne Stevenson: Selected Poems, edited by Andrew Motion, in conjunction with the Neglected Masters Award. This series is exclusively devoted to the greatest figures in American literature.
Following two collections in the US in 1965 and 1969, she published her renowned family history sequence Correspondences, along with Travelling Behind Glass: Selected Poems 1963-1973, with Oxford University Press in 1974. After seven more books with OUP, she moved her publishing to Bloodaxe when OUP shut down its poetry list in 1999. In 2000 Bloodaxe reissued her OUP Collected Poems 1955-1995 at the same time as a new collection, Granny Scarecrow. These were followed by A Report from the Border (2003) and a new expanded retrospective, Poems 1955-2005 (2005), and then by three later collections, Stone Milk (2007), Astonishment (2012) and Completing the Circle (2020).
As well as her numerous collections of poetry, Anne Stevenson 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 Books, 2006). In 2016 she gave the Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures, published by Bloodaxe in 2017 as About Poems and how poems are not about.
She held many literary fellowships, and was the inaugural winner of Britain's biggest literary prize, the Northern Rock Foundation Writer's Award, in 2002. In 2007 she was awarded three major prizes in the USA: the $200,000 Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award for Poetry by the Lannan Foundation of Santa Fe, a Neglected Masters Award from the Poetry Foundation of Chicago and The Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry from The Sewanee Review in Tennessee. In 2008, The Library of America published Anne Stevenson: Selected Poems, edited by Andrew Motion, in conjunction with the Neglected Masters Award. This series is exclusively devoted to the greatest figures in American literature.
Following two collections in the US in 1965 and 1969, she published her renowned family history sequence Correspondences, along with Travelling Behind Glass: Selected Poems 1963-1973, with Oxford University Press in 1974. After seven more books with OUP, she moved her publishing to Bloodaxe when OUP shut down its poetry list in 1999. In 2000 Bloodaxe reissued her OUP Collected Poems 1955-1995 at the same time as a new collection, Granny Scarecrow. These were followed by A Report from the Border (2003) and a new expanded retrospective, Poems 1955-2005 (2005), and then by three later collections, Stone Milk (2007), Astonishment (2012) and Completing the Circle (2020).
As well as her numerous collections of poetry, Anne Stevenson 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 Books, 2006). In 2016 she gave the Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures, published by Bloodaxe in 2017 as About Poems and how poems are not about.
Content
9 Preface
13 Saying the World
I
17 Anaesthesia
18 Poppy Day
20 Sandi Russell Sings
22 Defeating the Gloom Monster
25 A Dream of Guilt
26 Improvisation
28 Completing the Circle
29 Ann Arbor Days
31 The Day
32 Choose to be a Rainbow
II
35 How Poems Arrive
36 Dover Beach Reconsidered
37 The Bully Thrush
39 Winter Idyll from My Back Window
40 Goodbye & Cheers
41 Shared
42 Voice Over
43 Candles
44 A Compensation of Sorts
46 Of Poetry and Wine
47 After Wittgenstein
48 Now We Are 80
52 Verses from a Waiting Room
53 An Old Poet's View from the Departure Platform
III
56 As the Past Passes
57 The Gift Bowl
61 Pronunciation
68 Mississippi (1960s)
77 At 85
79 Acknowledgements
13 Saying the World
I
17 Anaesthesia
18 Poppy Day
20 Sandi Russell Sings
22 Defeating the Gloom Monster
25 A Dream of Guilt
26 Improvisation
28 Completing the Circle
29 Ann Arbor Days
31 The Day
32 Choose to be a Rainbow
II
35 How Poems Arrive
36 Dover Beach Reconsidered
37 The Bully Thrush
39 Winter Idyll from My Back Window
40 Goodbye & Cheers
41 Shared
42 Voice Over
43 Candles
44 A Compensation of Sorts
46 Of Poetry and Wine
47 After Wittgenstein
48 Now We Are 80
52 Verses from a Waiting Room
53 An Old Poet's View from the Departure Platform
III
56 As the Past Passes
57 The Gift Bowl
61 Pronunciation
68 Mississippi (1960s)
77 At 85
79 Acknowledgements