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- GenresPoetry
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First published September 25, 1969
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Anne Stevenson
82 books27 followersAnne Stevenson was an American-British poet and biographer.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
February 4, 2018
My favorite poem of this collection 'The Real Dreamers'.
August 13, 2016
A collection in three parts, I particularly enjoyed the opening section, which begins with poems exploring gender and the domestic sphere before moving on to sex, pregnancy and motherhood, then bereavement, all with an intriguing mix of surreal, surprising and often sinister imagery. Pregnant and The Loss are the two poems that stand out, compact poems brimming with emotion.
Part two contains poems of place, offering representations of cities, counties, regions and sometimes entire countries compressed into a single poem – England, Sierra Nevada, New York, the Fens, Italy, middle England, Hertfordshire, Utah, and North Carolina. While approaches vary significantly, with some implying an underlying weirdness, many seemed too safe and even a little trite for my tastes, and are at odds with the rest of the collection.
The final part returns to subjects and tone encountered in the opening section, this time with further focus on nature – the sea, the moon, the river, snow and flowers occupying key space. The final poem, The End Of It, is brief yet striking in its beauty: “Let darkness come down / Like sleep to our murderous star.”
The narratives in some of the poems in sections one and three reminded me of the work of weird fiction author Shirley Jackson – the everyday and the mundane described in such a manner as to highlight an underlying strangeness, an uncomfortable, creeping sense of unease, particularly in The Takeover, The Garden of Intellect and The Two Countries.
Part two contains poems of place, offering representations of cities, counties, regions and sometimes entire countries compressed into a single poem – England, Sierra Nevada, New York, the Fens, Italy, middle England, Hertfordshire, Utah, and North Carolina. While approaches vary significantly, with some implying an underlying weirdness, many seemed too safe and even a little trite for my tastes, and are at odds with the rest of the collection.
The final part returns to subjects and tone encountered in the opening section, this time with further focus on nature – the sea, the moon, the river, snow and flowers occupying key space. The final poem, The End Of It, is brief yet striking in its beauty: “Let darkness come down / Like sleep to our murderous star.”
The narratives in some of the poems in sections one and three reminded me of the work of weird fiction author Shirley Jackson – the everyday and the mundane described in such a manner as to highlight an underlying strangeness, an uncomfortable, creeping sense of unease, particularly in The Takeover, The Garden of Intellect and The Two Countries.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews