Anne Stevenson: Selected Poems

edited by andrew motion

In October 2007 The Poetry Foundation named Anne Stevenson the winner of the second Neglected Masters Award, designed to bring renewed critical attention to the work of an under-recognized, significant American poet. In conjunction with the award, The Library of America proudly presents this selection of poems by Stevenson, who has been described by Andrew Motion "as one of the most individual poetic voices to have emerged on either side of the Atlantic in the last fifty years." Stevenson's is a poetry of astonishing range—formally, emotionally, and in the historical and geographic scope of what it addresses. Family and solitude, natural splendor and human craft, the vicissitudes of desire and grief are confronted with fierce directness and unfailing freshness, in modes ranging from songlike lyrics and formal elegies to the intergenerational complexities of her long verse narrative Correspondences, included here in its entirety.

Stevenson, 74, who was also awarded the 2007 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Lannan Foundation, was born in England to American parents, grew up in New England and in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and has spent most of her adult life in England. This volume, the first American edition of her work in more than a generation, is edited by Andrew Motion, England's Poet Laureate.

"Stevenson has produced a large body of work which is at once representative of common contemporary concerns and highly individual. She is a voice for our age and compellingly her own questing and questioning self." —Andrew Motion

Anne Stevenson reading two poems, “Poem for a Daughter” and “A Marriage.”
Excerpted from the British DVD-book In Person: 30 Poets, filmed by Pamela Robertson-Pearce & edited by Neil Astley (Bloodaxe Books, 2008).