Best Selling Books by Anne Stevenson

In this innovative series of public lectures at Newcastle University, leading contemporary poets speak about the craft and practice of poetry to audiences drawn from both the city and the university. The lectures are then published in book form by Bloodaxe, giving readers everywhere the opportunity to learn what the poets themselves think about their own subject. Anne Stevenson argues that change is time''s one permanent condition, that it continually transforms the present into the past at the very moment it opens the future to further change. She also argues that without an understanding of how poetry has re-invented itself through its history, today''s present innovations are likely to remain rootless and unnourished. Drawing on lines from her own poem, ''The Fiction Makers'' - ''They thought they were living now/ But they were living then'' - Stevenson traces the theories, fashions and beliefs of modern poets in America and Britain since the 1930s (the span, in fact, of her own lifetime). Giving special attention to the voices of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop and Wallace Stevens, she shows how, after World War II, populist movements in the United States rose up against a university-based establishment, introducing a barbarian energy into the art while at the same time destroying its solid base in traditional rhythm and form. Each lecture features poets she considers to be among the most effective of their kind, ranging from W.B. Yeats, Robert Lowell and Richard Wilbur, to Frank O''Hara, John Ashbery and Denise Levertov. In her final lecture, she quotes extensively from friends and contemporaries recently deceased: G.F. Dutton, Frances Horovitz, William Martin, and finishing with a tribute to the voice and ear of Seamus Heaney. To the three texts of her 2016 Newcastle/Bloodaxe Lectures Stevenson has conjoined additional essays originally given as talks in the Chapel of St Chad''s College in the University of Durham. These have mainly to do with rhythms and sounds rather than with subject-matter, arguing that, until very recently, it was a defining virtue of poetry not to be about anything that could better or more clearly be said in prose. Finally Stevenson, having had a number of second thoughts about Bitter Fame, her biography of Sylvia Plath (1989), includes a talk on this American poet''s astonishing gift and tragic life, first given at Ledbury Poetry Festival in 2013.

In the Orchard is not so much a collection of poems about birds as a book of memories and rare moments in which a number of familiar birds have played a spark-like role in bringing poems about. They are chiefly lyrical in character and range in time from ''Resurrection'' written over fifty years ago to recent poems like ''The Bully Thrush'', but they are not ordered chronologically and shouldn''t be associated with events in the poet''s private life. The etchings by Alan Turnbull are the result of his patient and painstaking study of each bird as it relates to the poem in which it appears.

La mattina dell''11 febbraio 1963 Sylvia Plath, appena trentenne, si tolse la vita aprendo il rubinetto del gas della casa londinese in cui abitava con i due figli piccoli. Il suo suicidio ha dato vita a un vero e proprio mito, alimentato dalla pubblicazione delle poesie di "Ariel", del 1965, che fece dell''infelice scrittrice la portavoce, in buona misura inconsapevole, delle generazioni arrabbiate, disilluse e sconcertate degli anni ''60 e ''70, e in particolar modo delle donne. Attorno alla vita e alla morte della Plath si è acceso un groviglio di polemiche, fraintendimenti, interpretazioni, accuse che ha distolto l''attenzione dall''inquietante bellezza della sua opera. In questa biografia, considerata un piccolo classico, Anne Stevenson si avvale delle testimonianze delle persone più vicine alla Plath - amici, collaboratori, familiari - e sgombra il campo dai malintesi, offrendoci un ritratto veritiero di questa donna ambiziosa e affascinante, forte e fragile, intelligente e arrabbiata: una scrittrice dal talento unico e originalissimo, in perenne lotta con se stessa e con i propri demoni creativi. Anne Stevenson (1933) è autrice di una dozzina di raccolte di poesie tra cui Granny Scarecrow, The Collected Poems 1955-1995, Four and a Half Dancing Men e Correspondences oltre che di alcuni volumi di critica letteraria. È stata docente in numerose università britanniche e nel 2002 ha ricevuto, per la sua opera in versi, il prestigioso Northern Rock Foundation Writer''s Award.

Anne Stevenson (1933-2020) was a major American and British poet. Born in Cambridge of American parents, she grew up in the States but lived in Britain for most of her adult life. 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), drawing on sixteen collections which are presented in their original order of publication.

Anne Stevenson has always been a restless, questioning poet whose openness has ensured that each of her many collections has been distinctive and challenging. The new one is characteristically full of ideas, but as always, Stevenson approaches them by looking intently at small things and seemingly insignificant events.