Collected Poems
Published on 23. February 2023
724 pages
978-1-78037-652-3 (ISBN)
Description
Anne Stevenson's Collected Poems draws on sixteen previous collections to showcase the work of this major American and British poet.
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).
More details
Person
Anne Stevenson (1933-2020) was a major American and British poet. As well as many poetry collections, she published a biography of Sylvia Plath (1989), two books of essays, Between the Iceberg and the Ship (1998) and About Poems and how poems are not about (Bloodaxe, 2017), and two critical studies of Elizabeth Bishop's work, most recently Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop (Bloodaxe, 2006). Her Collected Poems (Bloodaxe, 2023) supersedes Poems 1955-2005 (2005), with the addition of poems from her final three collections, Stone Milk (2007), Astonishment (2012) and Completing the Circle (2020).
Content
- Intro
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Contents
- Note on the Text
- Source Texts
- from Living in America (1965)
- The Traveller
- The Women
- To My Daughter in a Red Coat
- Living in America
- Harvard
- Fairy Tale
- In Winter
- Love
- The Garden of Intellect
- Dreaming of Immortality in a Thatched Hut
- Two Quatrains
- Still Life in Utah
- Nightmare in North Carolina
- Nuns
- Ann Arbor (A Profile)
- In March
- After Her Death
- Apology
- The Dear Ladies of Cincinnati
- Opera Piece
- Sierra Nevada
- The Grey Land
- from Reversals (1970)
- 'Birth'
- Reversals
- Aubade
- Sous-entendu
- On Not Being Able to Look at the Moon
- Two Love Poems
- In the House
- The Spirit Is Too Blunt an Instrument
- Stabilities
- The Victory
- The Suburb
- The Loss
- New York
- The Watchers
- The Takeover
- The Unhappened
- Morning
- One Sunday
- England
- Fen People
- In Middle England
- The Return
- The Mother
- A River
- American Rhetoric for Scotland
- from Travelling Behind Glass: Selected Poems (1974)
- Siskin
- Generations
- At Thirteen
- Coming Back to Cambridge
- Theme with Variations
- Five Poems of Innocence and Experience
- The Crush
- The Marriage
- The Affair
- The Demolition
- Old Scholars
- Travelling Behind Glass
- On the Edge of the Island
- Correspondences (1974)
- Correspondences: A Family History in Letters
- from Enough of Green (1977)
- To Write It
- The Sun Appears in November
- North Sea off Carnoustie
- The Exhibition
- East Coast
- Fire and the Tide
- Summer
- The Bench
- Boating Pool at Night
- Winter Flowers
- The Lighthouse
- Night Wind, Dundee
- Aberdeen
- The Mudtower
- Path
- With My Sons at Boarhills
- By the Boat House, Oxford
- Ruin
- Posted
- Wanted
- Drought
- Ragwort
- The Minister
- The Doctor
- Enough of Green
- A Summer Place
- People Around
- Early Rain
- Respectable House
- Meniscus
- Resurrection
- The Sirens Are Virtuous
- In the Orchard
- Cain
- Temporarily in Oxford
- The Price
- Thales and Li Po
- After the End of It
- from Minute By Glass Minute (1982)
- If I Could Paint Essences
- Buzzard and Alder
- Burnished (A Riddle)
- Swifts
- The Three
- The Garden
- Himalayan Balsam
- At Kilpeck Church
- Walking Early by the Wye
- After the Fall
- Whose Goat?
- Giving Rabbit to My Cat Bonnie
- The Fish Are All Sick
- Pennine
- Ah Babel
- From the Men of Letters
- Small Philosophical Poem
- He and It (A Pathetic Fantasy)
- The Figure in the Carpet
- About Crying
- Poem for a Daughter
- The Holly and the Ivy
- Transparencies
- Lockkeeper's Island
- Earth Station
- The Man in the Wind
- Sonnets for Five Seasons
- This House
- Complaint
- Between
- Statis
- The Circle
- from The Fiction-Makers (1985)
- From an Unfinished Poem
- The Fiction-Makers
- Making Poetry
- Waving to Elizabeth
- Re-reading Jane
- The Blue Pool
- Shale
- A Dream of Stones
- Where the Animals Go
- Musician's Widow
- Gannets Diving
- Ailanthus with Ghosts
- Two Poems for Frances Horovitz
- Red Rock Fault
- Willow Song
- Demolition
- A Prayer to Live with Real People
- Forgotten of the Foot
- Signs
- In the Tunnel of Summers
- Gales
- Spring Song
- On Watching a Cold Woman Wade into a Cold Sea
- Household Gods
- November
- Claude Glass
- Epitaph for a Good Mouser
- Divorcing
- Hands
- Dreaming of the Dead
- from Winter Time (1986)
- Jarrow
- From the Primrose Path
- This
- A Love Sequence
- The Morden Angel
- Naming the Flowers
- from The Other House (1990)
- In the Nursery
- The Other House
- Talking Sense to My Senses
- Elegy
- What I Miss
- Inverkirkaig
- Icon
- Journal Entry: Impromptu in C Minor
- North Easter: April, 1986
- Night Walking with Shadows
- Night Thoughts and False Confessions
- And even then
- Call them Poppies
- 'All Canal Boat Cruises Start Here
- Inquit Deus
- From the Motorway
- Stone Fig
- Cramond
- Celebrity
- Eros
- Three Poems for Sylvia Plath
- Nightmares, Daymoths
- Letter to Sylvia Plath
- Hot Wind, Hard Rain
- Seven Poems after Francis Bacon
- 1 Study for a Portrait on a Folding Bed
- 2 Study of a Dog
- 3 Three Figures and Portrait
- 4 Seated Figure
- 5 Portrait of a Lady
- 6 Triptych
- 7 Study for a Portrait of Van Gogh
- Journal Entry: Ward's Island
- Little Paul and the Sea
- Calendar
- from Four and a Half Dancing Men (1993)
- Salter's Gate
- From My Study
- Cold
- Brueghel's Snow
- Four and a Half Dancing Men
- Washing the Clocks
- Negatives
- The Professor's Tale
- Hans Memling's Sibylla Sambetha (1480)
- Politesse
- A Quest
- Trinity at Low Tide
- Visits to the Cemetery of the Long Alive
- Hadrian's
- A Sepia Garden
- Bloody Bloody
- Black Hole
- Lost
- A Tricksy June
- To witness pain is a different form of pain
- Binoculars in Ardudwy
- When the camel is dust it goes through the needle's eye
- Painting It In
- Late
- Terrorist
- Two Poems for John Cole and One for Annabel Cole
- Dinghy
- Cambrian
- After You Left
- from The Collected Poems 1955-1995 (1996)
- Occasional verses
- The Parson and the Romany
- Ballad of the Made Maid
- from Granny Scarecrow (2000)
- I
- Vertigo
- Innocence and Experience
- The White Room
- A Surprise on the First Day of School
- Going Back
- John Keats, 1821-1950
- Arioso Dolente
- 'Love Stories and a Bed of Sand'
- II
- Moonrise
- Clydie is dead!
- Incident
- Suicide
- Skills
- An Angel
- Granny Scarecrow
- Freeing Lizzie
- Phoenicurus phoenicurus
- Pity the Birds
- Comet
- The Wrekin
- False Flowers
- Kosovo Surprised by Mozart
- Leaving
- Old Wife's Tale
- On Going Deaf
- A Luxury
- Oysters
- To witness pain is a different form of pain
- The Theologian's Confession
- Whistler's Gentleman by the Sea
- III
- A Parable for Norman
- Poem for Harry Fainlight
- Invocation and Interruption
- A Present
- The Name of the Worm
- The Miracle of Camp 60
- A Ballad for Apothecaries
- Postscriptum
- from A Report from the Border (2003)
- Who's Joking with the Photographer?
- The Writer in the Corner
- Washing My Hair
- Two Poems for Nerys Johnson
- Portrait of the Artist in an Orthopaedic Halo Crowned with Flowers
- Passing Her House
- Red Hot Sex
- Haunted
- Passifloraceae
- A Marriage
- Hearing with My Fingers
- At the Grave of Ezra Pound
- Skin Deep
- Cashpoint Charlie
- A Hot Night in New York
- New York Is Crying
- A Cradle of Fist
- Clovenhoof 's-bane
- A Report from the Border
- Branch Line
- A Tourists' Guide to the Fens
- Carol of the Birds
- To Phoebe
- Questionable
- Prophylactic Sonnets
- The Inn
- Some Poems from Cwm Nantcol
- The Wind, the Sun and the Moon
- The Unaccommodated
- Under Moelfre
- Why Take Against Mythology? (1)
- Why Take Against Mythology? (2)
- Attacking the Waterfall
- Spring Poem
- Without Me
- May Bluebells, Coed Aber Artro
- Green Mountain, Black Mountain
- from Poems 1955-2005 (2005)
- A Riddle for Peter Scupham
- In the Weather of Deciduous Souls
- An Impenitent Ghost
- Fool's Gold
- 17.14 Out of Newcastle
- It looks so simple from a distance.
- Four Grim Fairy Tales
- 1 Rapunzel
- 2 Sleeping Beauty
- 3 Was Cinderella Ever Happy?
- 4 If Wishes Were Fishes
- Christmas Comfort and the Green Man
- As I Lay Sleeping
- Killing Spiders
- Melon meaning melon
- Toy
- Variations on a Line by Peter Redgrove
- from Stone Milk (2007)
- Prelude from Piers Plowman
- A Lament for the Makers
- Near the End of a Day
- Stone Milk
- Before Eden
- The Enigma
- Waving Goodbye
- Orcop
- Inheriting My Grandmother's Nightmare
- An Even Shorter History of Nearly Everything
- Jet Lag
- City Lights
- Beach Kites
- The Blackbird at Pwllymarch
- from Astonishment (2012)
- I
- The Loom
- Constable Clouds and a Kestrel's Feather
- Bird in Hand
- Teaching My Sons to Swim in Walden Pond
- Night Thoughts
- Paper
- On Line
- An Exchange in the Time Bank
- II Sonnets and Variations
- It's astonishing
- Doppler
- After the Funeral
- Elegy: In Coherent Light
- The Miracle of the Bees and the Foxgloves
- The Master and His Cast
- Not a Hook, Not a Shelf, Maybe a Song?
- How it is
- The Voice
- Caring More Than Caring
- Carols in King's
- III Ardudwy
- 'Wind from the North.'
- Night Snow
- Thaw
- Spring Diary
- Arrival Dream
- Snow Squalls
- North Easter
- A Clearer Memory
- Then like a present
- On Harlech Beach
- Drench
- On Reflection
- October Song
- Goat Cull in Cwm Nancol
- Roses in December
- IV
- Photographing Change
- In the Museum of Floating Bodies and Flammable Souls
- All Those Attempts in the Changing Room
- Tulips
- The Password
- Five Poems in Memory of a Marriage
- A Match
- After Words
- Hotel New Year
- Epitaph for a Hedonist
- A Visit
- Demeter and Her Daughter
- Spring Again
- Notes
- from Completing the Circle (2020)
- Preface
- Saying the World
- I
- Anaesthesia
- Poppy Day
- Sandi Russell Sings
- Defeating the Gloom Monster
- A Dream of Guilt
- Improvisation
- Completing the Circle
- Ann Arbor Days
- The Day
- Choose to be a Rainbow
- II
- How Poems Arrive
- Dover Beach Reconsidered
- The Bully Thrush
- Winter Idyll from My Back Window
- Goodbye & Cheers
- Shared
- Voice Over
- Candles
- A Compensation of Sorts
- After Wittgenstein
- Now We Are 80
- An Old Poet's View from the Departure Platform
- III
- As the Past Passes
- The Gift Bowl
- Pronunciation
- At 85
- Notes
- Index of Titles and First Lines
- Selected Bibliography
- Biographical Note
