Elisabeth Stevens's Blog

A line from Edgar Allan Poe's poem, ''To a Lost Love,'' provides the title for my elegiac, provocative, and sexy new novel of the 1950's. A Green Isle in the Sea, Love returns to that calm, politically and sexually conservative era of Post World War II optimism before the angry years of racial violence and feminist protest that followed.

The book is currently available on Amazon and I would greatly appreciate your review. If you have purchased and do leave a review please let me know and I would love to send you a free copy of my recent book of drawings, The Sixties in Black and White as a token of my appreciation.

Thank you again!

This month, we mark the 51st anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. This is where my novel "RIde a Bright and Shining Pony" is set. All month long, we will be remembering this great event through the characters and setting of the book. Here's a taste:

"The year is 1963. The day is August 28th, the day of Martin Luther King’s March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Now, in the 50th anniversary year of that historic march, a former Washington Post staff writer recreates the dramatic moment. Merging fact and fiction, Elisabeth Stevens has written the fast-moving story of two young lovers whose lives and destinies are irrevocably and tragically intertwined with the March—and history."

Charles Wright, 78-year-old, retired University of Virginia professor from Charlottesville who was named the next Poet Laureate of the United States last month, is a visionary poet. Does that mean he is to be compared to William Butler Yeats, even William Blake?

Possibly. What it surely means is that Wright is a watcher, a looker, a solitary and passionate observer––not of people, whom he seldom writes about––but of places, paintings and favorite views that often evoke eschatological musings. In “Driving through Tennessee” from his volume:
The World of the Ten Thousand Things: Poems 1980-1990, Wright begins
with allusions to his parents and “the towns that we lived in once,” but
verges quickly to “...Jesus returning, and Stephen Martyr” in a poem that
ends like a prayer.

In the same volume, Wright, who once lived in Northern Italy, often alludes to Renaissance artists such as Cimabue and Ucello and architects such as Brunelleschi and Strozzi. It is not surprising then, to discover that a later collection Bye-and-Bye: Selected Late Poems, of 2011, has a Madonna by Pierro della Francesca on the paperback cover. The poet’s artistic preferences, which include Morandi and Cezanne among the moderns, seem to run to masters for whom structure and precise composition is paramount.

Is an intelligent, even-aristocratic a taste for order intrinsic to the long, unrhymed lines Wright favors? If so, there may be a hint of it in his “A Short History of My Life” (from Bye-and Bye). The final lines affirm: “The world in its dark grace./ I have tried to record it.”

Don’t believe it. I am not the only poet who has ever written a poem about a refrigerator, an elastic sock, a zipper, or dust. Most of the poems in RAGBAG are about inanimate things that inhabit and influence our lives––and survive us. Dust, included in an ode called “Messes”, has a circulation authors may envy.

Old, but still living at home in a small, upstate town, Muriel is not quite like other people. Her practical sister Caroline Lucy is worried about her. Muriel has started writing letters to dead people. Will they answer? Why is this play called: “I Told You So”?

I often make etchings on copper plates to illustrate my books. Not all the 48 poems of love and passion in SIRENS’ SONGS could be pictured. I picked thirteen poems I could visualize and made thirteen etchings. KIRKUS REVIEWS chose this paperback as one of the hundred best indie books of 2011.

I have lived and worked in Washington, D.C. several times. In this novel, set on August 28, 1963, the day of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, history is interwoven with an imagined and tragic love story. The March is real, the city is real; the characters came from my mind like shadows.

What is fiction? Doesn’t it stem from fact? Henry James wrote of “seeds”––little incidents that grew into novels. One of the six stories in HORSE & CART grew from an unusual encounter. In a quiet, suburban New Jersey neighborhood, I met a wild old man driving a broken down cart drawn by an a skeletal, exhausted horse.

In Stevens’ (Sirens’ Songs, 2011, etc.) intelligent novel, the civil-rights March on Washington ignites one woman’s journey to heartbreak and self-awareness.

It’s August 27, 1963, and Cynthia, a white, divorced researcher for a New York history-book publisher, gets off the bus in Washington, D.C., eager to spend her two-week vacation with her boyfriend, Lester. But Cynthia is surrounded by people arriving for another reason: the March on Washington, scheduled for the following day, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and others would speak to hundreds of thousands. The city is restless; when Cynthia arrives at Lester’s house, the moment is disrupted by a neighbor calling in a false fire alarm.

Lester, a white journalist originally from Texas, is focused on the March; all Cynthia wants to talk about is getting married. Soon after Cynthia arrives, Lester’s college roommate calls to announce that he’s in town and demands to see Lester.

Throw in the general tumult of Lester’s African-American neighborhood on the eve of the March, and Cynthia’s fantasies of a romantic vacation don’t stand a chance. Before Lester leaves to work on a story, he and Cynthia schedule a late-night drink with Lester’s roommate.

Over the next 24 hours, Cynthia participates in the March on Washington, witnesses life-changing events, and confronts her own painful memories. Stevens’ tightly structured tale is filled with compelling observations: For example, when Cynthia gets off the bus, the driver’s eyes slide down her body, “exploring the folds of [her] skirt like a sticky finger.”

The novel confines the story to two days, which allows the characters to move quickly through the narrative, but it includes too many subplots for such a short time span. Although Cynthia tells her story in the first person, we learn more about Lester, and Cynthia’s first husband, Frank, than we do about Cynthia herself. This choice highlights Cynthia’s willingness to sacrifice everything for love, but readers may wish that the protagonist were more clearly drawn.

An engaging, if uneven, novel about personal upheaval during a time of monumental social change.

Sirens’ Songs is a Livre d’Artiste consisting of 48 erotic and romantic poems and 13 signed and numbered original copper plate etchings presented looseleaf in a handmade, cloth-covered, clamshell box in an edition of 20. Here is an excerpt:

The rocks below are sharp,
the tides are breaking high,
I call to you to come to me,
put out your frail white boat to sea and come, and come
and sail your boat to die.

The fog is white as death,
it rises from the sea,
my hair curls long, my skin shines soft, I sing to you to come to me,
to ride to me, to haste to me
to die.

I see your bow rise up
and break between black waves. You swim to me, you float to me, you lie with me–as others have– so pale, so clean, so cold,
they die...they die...they die....