by Andrew Motion

from Anne Stevenson: Selected Poems, edited with an introduction by Andrew Motion

Anne Stevenson is one of the most remarkable poetic voices to have emerged on either side of the Atlantic in the last fifty years. Her work covers an impressively wide range—from large-scale narratives to finely wrought lyrics—and is cleverly tuned to history but full of edgy individuality. In certain respects her achievement has been properly recognized: she has won several important prizes and generally found critical approval. Yet because she has never found the large general readership that she deserves, she can also be called a "neglected writer." Although the phrase has an inevitably melancholy ring to it, in Stevenson's case it is also proof of quality. She has always spurned the siren songs of mere fashionability; she has deliberately placed herself at the edge of orthodoxies; and she has made a virtue of remaining restless in her travels and placements as well as her thinking. This means the present Selected Poems has to embrace a paradox. It must aspire to win her a larger audience while at the same time honouring the qualities that prove her independence. It must show the ways in which her poetry utters general truths in an approachable idiom, but also celebrate its very particular insights and articulations.

In the biographical note to her collection Granny Scarecrow, published in 2000 when she was sixty-seven, we are told that Stevenson was "born in England of American parents, grew up in the States, but has lived in Britain for most of her adult life." This is fair enough, but as a resumé it can only hint at the questions that dominate her work. How does a personality define itself within a family? How does child-love translate into loving as an adult? What role do places play in the creation of a sensibility? And in particular: What is the relationship between thinking about questions of belonging, and observing the hard facts of location and habitat? At a time when political and social upheavals around the world have provoked many poets to consider the enigmas of arrival, Stevenson has produced a large body of work that is at once representative of common contemporary concerns and generously personal. She is a voice for our age and compellingly her own questing and questioning self.

Stevenson's originality is of a complex and multi-layered kind. As a student at the University of Michigan she began to write poetry while studying the challenges to puritanism in American writers such as Robert Frost and Elizabeth Bishop, of whom she later wrote a pioneering study. In the late 1980s she developed many related ideas in her biography of Sylvia Plath. (When it first appeared, this book was considered controversial in its even-handed treatment of Plath's marriage to Ted Hughes; other subsequent studies of the relationship have done a good deal to justify the approach.) Instead of trying to conceal the influence of these writers in her work, Stevenson openly addresses them in a number of poems, deliberately echoes them, and consciously allies herself to many of their practices. The effect is not in the least to compromise her authenticity; rather, it establishes the foundations of her work in a distinct tradition. She is herself a puritan writer who at once honors and contests her inheritance; writing in the heat generated by this personal conflict, she has forged a style that both registers and stands apart from the confessional modes and political dogmas of later twentieth-century women's poetry.

Stevenson's longest and best-sustained poetic examination of the puritan past is Correspondences (1974), the poem-cycle that first established her reputation in England following her departure from America and that provides a broad background to the rest of her writing. Its piecemeal family history—in which much of the material for the puritan Boyds is modelled on her mother's family, while her father's is represented by the more worldly Arbeiters—comprises letters, lyrics, and prose poems. It is at once a collection of wistfully entertained backward glances and a proof that Stevenson accepts the inevitability of change and challenge. In this respect, Correspondences anticipates her other and later long poem A Lament for the Makers (published in 2007 but not included here for reasons of space), in which she converses with the poets who have meant most to her across the years. Correspondences presents a drama of identity in a domestic context, A Lament does the same thing in literary terms. For both poems, the issue is not how to escape the past, but how to accommodate the past in the present; how to preserve its values and authenticities without becoming trapped in nostalgia or sapped by historical example.

The same questions are present from the outset in Stevenson's shorter pieces. We find them in one of the earliest lyrics in her first Collected Poems (1996), "To My Daughter in a Red Coat," where she says:

Child, your mittens tug your sleeves.
They lick your drumming feet, the leaves.
You come so fast, so fast.
You violate the past,
My daughter, as your coat dances.

They emerge again in many of her narrative poems—"The Dear Ladies of Cincinnati," for instance, in which we meet "the aunts" who "remembered the words of hit tunes they'd been courted to,/ avoided the contagion of thought/ so successfully that the game kept time to the music." And they circle too in the majority of her later poems about family matters. "Of course I love them," she says of her children in "The Mother." "That is my daughter and this is my son./ And this is my life I give them to please them./ It has never been used. Keep it safe, pass it on."

For all their general resonance, many of these shorter family poems arise from the same particular circumstances that Stevenson remembers in Correspondences. She was brought up in the university environments of Harvard, Yale, and Ann Arbor by parents she has called "intelligent and sympathetic." From her father, the philosopher C. L. Stevenson, she absorbed a love of classical music and an intolerance of unexamined, conformist opinion—as we discover in "Elegy," where music (and by implication all the arts, including poetry) is described as a means of reinterpreting the past, and where philosophy is by implication commended as a way of challenging accepted truths. It was her mother, however, who instilled in her a love of history together with the sturdy compassion that lies at the root of her poetry. We can see this in "Arioso Dolente," for instance, where Stevenson refers to her mother as someone "who read and thought and poured herself into me;/ she was the jug and I was the two-eared cup./ How she would scorn today's 'show-biz inanity,/ democracy twisted, its high ideals sold up!'"

Although Stevenson clearly owes debts to the traditions represented by her parents, these have done as much to provoke her sense of detachment as they have to stimulate a sense of belonging. For one thing, her father's work as a university teacher apparently bred in her a love-hate relationship with academies, which often produces sideswipes at their apparent desiccation and fustiness. In "Ann Arbor" we hear about "the usual/ academic antipathies"; in "Coming Back to Cambridge" we find dons and their wives who are "Arrogant./ Within the compass of wistfulness"; and in "By the Boat House, Oxford" we meet more academic wives "in their own quenched country" who are half-pitied and half-scorned for believing their husbands are "plainly superior." For another, Stevenson's father, in particular, set her a vital example about the value of intellectual restlessness—restlessness that formed a part of her compulsion to move from America to England, and then to spend much of her adult life moving around and laying claim to different parts of her adopted country: Cambridge, Oxford, the Welsh borders, Wales itself, the North-East.

The question Stevenson wants to answer in many of her early poems is not "when will I arrive at the one stable place I might call home," but "how can I benefit from and understand what it means to keep moving." In the work of her early maturity, it seems that sexual and married love might help her reach a conclusion. Yet for all their force and candor, her love poems habitually describe human tenderness in terms of landscape—suggesting that for her "home" will finally involve places more reliably than people. In the brief and potent lyric "New York," she wonders if "love, love, love/ is the only green in the jungle"; in "Reversals", she asks ". . . is love in its last metamorphosis arable,/ less than what was sometimes imaginary,/ more than what was usually accessible—/ full furrows harvested, a completed sky?"

This shift of trust away from individuals to their surroundings is often accompanied by forthright doubting of herself and others. "There only is one love—/which is never enough" we hear in "Theme with Variations," and in "The Marriage" she says with wry deprecation:

Even as it is,
there are compensations
for having to meet
nose to neck
chest to scapula
groin to rump
when they sleep.
They look, at least,
as if they were going
in the same direction.

(Strikingly, the personal difficulties registered here are often connected to the complications of raising children—complications that are linked to the family—matters raised more generally elsewhere. "A woman's life is her own/ until it is taken away/ by a first particular cry," she says in "Poem for a Daughter.")

Throughout Stevenson's fully mature work, this question of how to continue living in transit, and yet have an adequate sense of belonging, becomes her dominant theme. The title of her first selected poems, Travelling Behind Glass (1974), suggestively indicates that a part of her restlessness derives from the sense that she is falsely protected from reality. (As she says in "The Price": "My dear, the ropes that bind us/ are safe to hold;/ the walls that crush us/ keep us from the cold.") It is therefore not surprising that she should be strongly drawn to landscapes that are themselves fluid, or marginal—to borders and border-counties, to water and shorelines ("The sea is as near as we come to another world," she writes in "North Sea off Carnoustie"), and to objects that are either a kind of boundary in themselves (glass, for instance) or a reminder of mobility. In the same way her large number of good poems about birds, for example, tend to celebrate migratory species (such as swifts); and her similarly strong poems about flora and fauna often dwell on ideas of escape or transgression. "Ragwort" is characteristic:

They won't let railways alone, these ragged flowers.
They're some remorseless joy of dereliction
Darkest banks exhale like vivid breath
as bricks divide to let them root between.
How every falling place concocts their smile,
taking what's left and making a song of it.

There is another and even larger reason for Stevenson to insist on the need to keep moving, keep enquiring. This has less to do with her sense of being adrift in the physical world than of being philosophically in two minds. In much the same sense that she feels she is living between generations, between certain kinds of landscape, between certain named places and certain loved individuals, so she also feels divided between different kinds of response to experience. Early in her writing life, there are signs that Stevenson feels tempted to heal this division by abolishing herself. In the poem "Travelling Behind Glass," for instance, we hear her ask for

. . . a sea
to be accommodating,
to warm me, obey me,
accept me like an arm;
in time to release me
entirely, as nothing at all.
As belonging to nothing at all.

As her work develops, she finds a bolder and more subtle solution to her dilemma—one that involves her in making repeated efforts to distinguish between a thought-filled response to the world, and one which depends on more sensuous kinds of appreciation and involvement.

We can see the differences being weighed in the aptly titled "Small Philosophical Poem," which sets "the pleasure of thought" experienced by Dr Animus against the more material existence of his wife, Anima. Short as it is, this lyric establishes the integrity as well as the aridity of the doctor's position, and the warmth (the "love") as well as the vulnerability (the "fear") of his wife's—implying at its close that although Anima must bear the burdens of her consciousness, they nevertheless connect her with the world in more valuable ways than any her husband has at his disposal. A similar point is made in the elegy for Anne Pennington, "Dreaming of the Dead," where Stevenson says

Oh, I am what I see and know,
But no other solid thing's there

Except for the terrible glow
Of your face and its quiet belief,
Light wood ash falling like snow

On my weaker grief.

Such poems form the bedrock of Stevenson's work because they prove that her final commitment as a writer is to the ragged, volatile, and familiarly uncertain world, not to a version of experience that has been tidied up to fit a controlling idea. But it is also a mark of her quality as a poet, and further proof of her need for continual self-testing, that this commitment is never entirely fixed and settled. The surfaces of her best work, which are always impressively alive to the significance of things-in-themselves, are repeatedly disturbed by incursions from the thinking mind. These make her in the best sense an uncomfortable writer—one whose inheritance (which promoted notions of honesty, austerity, and philosophical rigor) has led to her cautious acceptance that art can look faithfully at the evolutionary fleetingness of human life without paying lip service to a righteous God or a benevolent-minded Designer. As she has said herself, "If my poems have any value as art, it is because they ARE art. What I really learned from Elizabeth Bishop (and from Sylvia Plath too) is that poetry matters when content, form, passion unite in language that speaks to the ear and heart as much as to the mind—to body and soul, you might say, as a single, always threatened, always perishable entity."

It's not just that Stevenson refuses to settle for easy conclusions about what makes a personality complete, and about what makes life bearable; she is also and often agitated by the act of writing itself—debating how it can best shoulder its responsibilities, and manifest the contradictory truths of nature. In the majority of her poems, these agitations are given a local habitation and a name: they arise in particular relationships and particular landscapes. They also stand clear in a handful of poems about writing itself. Some of these question the ability of language to capture what it seeks to express—"the inescapable ache/ of trying to catch, say, the catness of cat/ as he crouches, stalking his shadow,/ on the other side of the window." Others (and especially in her book The Fiction Makers, 1985), call the entire business of writing into question: "In the event/ the event is sacrificed/ to a fiction of its having happened." Others again, and particularly those that mention her increasing deafness, go so far as to wonder whether her faith in seeking to comprehend the world through the senses is in fact well-founded. But while these questions are posed in all seriousness (or seriously laughing) they are never allowed to undermine her faith in first principles. The devastations of philosophy always prove weaker than the consolations of mystery, form, and sympathetic wit—as we can see in her typically courageous short poem "On Going Deaf":

I've lost a sense. Why should I care?
Searching myself, I find a spare.
I keep that sixth sense in repair
And set it deftly, like a snare.

A part of what Stevenson means by "that sixth sense" is the imagination itself, and it is right and proper than any introduction to her work should end by insisting on its authority in her work. She is not much given to plundering her unconscious (however interested she might be in dream-stories), and neither does she often yeast up her language to evoke surreal states of mind. But she does continually animate her acts of clear-seeing by connecting the exterior world with her interior states. It is, of course, a connection that all poets make to a greater or lesser extent, but in her case the fusions have a particular resonance. They are the means by which Stevenson stays true to her inheritance even as she extends it. They are proof that she is a puritan writer who is both at peace and at odds with herself. Her work is continually fortified by that contradiction, for reasons that she makes plain—appropriately enough—at the end of her kindred-spirit "Letter to Sylvia Plath":

We learn to be human when we kneel
To imagination, which is real
long after reality is dead
and history has put its bones to bed.

About the Author
Andrew Motion is Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway College, University of London. He has been UK Poet Laureate since 1999.

Anne Stevenson: Selected Poems
American Poets Project—The Library of America
New York