Stone Milk
Published on 27. September 2007
Book
Paperback/Softback
80 pages
978-1-85224-775-1 (ISBN)
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 ageing 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.
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 *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Tyne and Wear
United Kingdom
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 217 mm
Width: 150 mm
Thickness: 6 mm
Weight
122 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-85224-775-1 (9781852247751)
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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.