Stone Milk - Softcover

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.

Stevenson is quite concerned with aging and death in her newest collection. Nearing 75, she has seen plenty of friends and colleagues depart. She hails some of her poetic peers, long and recently gone, in the long opening poem, “A Lament for the Makers,” openly inspired by the similarly titled piece by medieval Scotland’s greatest poet, William Dunbar, and often alluding to the lines as well as affectionately conjuring the spirits of John Berryman, Ted Hughes, and others, though incidents in her own life are what she most often recalls. Losses, real and figurative, from weakening vision in the perfectly pitched “Near the End of the Day” to a son’s leavetaking after a visit to the hours one “loses” by flying westward, are the concerns of several short poems, while others weigh surprising late-life temperamental developments (see “Stone Milk”) and conceptions (see “Beach Kites”). Three “dedications” laud and celebrate living peers, and a satirically feminist take on Euripides’ Medea concludes. Everything sings, with or without rhyme and in many emotional keys. --Ray Olson