(This review first appeared in Roundyhouse 4 (December 2000) pp. 39-40.)
Granny Scarecrow (Bloodaxe £7.95) is Anne Stevenson's first slim volume since O.U.P. brought out her Collected Poems 1955-1995 in 1996. Despite her much-anthologised status, Stevenson is an unfashionable poet. When I interviewed her for Poetry Wales in 1996, she declared that these days she feels very old. Younger poets, she believes, are falling between the stools of political poetry and deconstructionist models. British culture "seems to me at once degenerate and self-congratulatory; mediocrity crowning mediocrity at every possible level; and the whole prizefight sponsored by well-meaning bureaucrats". Stevenson has long been in the habit of speaking her mind, and she isn't afraid of upsetting people in the process. There are still those who can't forgive her for her less than adulatory biography of Sylvia Plath; many feminists saw it as a betrayal of the sorority. But Stevenson sees no virtue in political correctness of any sort and describes herself as "a teeth-gnashing liberal individualist". And those teeth can be pretty sharp.
Her poetry has no truck, then, with self-conscious navel-gazing language games. She holds to a traditional view of language as an instrument of exploration and discovery, an interrogator of experience. Poetry has a subject-matter, and far from that subject-matter shrinking in face of the onslaughts of post-modern theory, it must expand in an effort to encompass the world revealed by science – by physics, cosmology, biology. In pursuing her quarry with a passionate intellect, she recalls the aspirations of Yeats. Here, in its entirety, is "Vertigo":
Mind led body
to the edge of the precipice.
They stared in desire
at the naked abyss.
If you love me, said mind,
take that step into silence.
If you love me, said body,
turn and exist.
The suspended, unresolved nature of this dialogue of self and soul is characteristic of a poet who refuses to settle for easy answers. So too is the instinctive feeling for form: the weights and balances of the poem's structure perfectly complement its meaning.
In a time when too many poets seem to have hitched their wagons to fancy rather than imagination, Stevenson goes for the full Coleridgean programme. Her mind works to associate and connect, to bring together objects from seemingly irreconcilable spheres. In one of the most remarkable poems here, "Comet", she links the Hale-Bopp comet with beetle, spider and butterfly, the whole surprisingly, yet cogently, concluding as an elegy for the Welsh historian Lewis Lloyd, whom Stevenson knew in his last years.
...Have you noticed
how a butterfly, starved, just out of its chrysalis
but struck, somehow, by a look, will cancel its programme
of fluttering visits and, locked to a petal,
transform itself into a leaf?
Lives. Terrified of shadows.
Where does time go when memory loosens its orbit
and whirls into the night?
In wild trajectories of broken light,
first this, then that dead face flares and burns out.
Where's the soul of immense Lewis, maritime historian
shadowed by his shadow, now that his blurred bulk,
slurring home at midnight, learned and drunk,
has berthed in the sound harbour of his books?
And still what in him matters is the matter of Wales.
There, blazing back of my eyelids, comets' tails,
indelible Vs grooved in salt water by wrecked prows.
Typically, Stevenson can fuse her affection for the historian with both respect for his scholarship and an honest glance at his Falstaffian girth and capacity. In the dramatic final sentence, burning comet and dead man meet in the open sea of that thrilled yet valedictory phrase "wrecked prows". The closure is as far removed from the "carefully pulled punch" of the exemplary, warily ironized English contemporary poem as one could wish.
In another memorable poem, Stevenson brings together the tragedy of Kosovo and the music of Mozart in a revisitation of the Keatsian theme of the teasing coexistence in the world of great art and human suffering. The poem begins with an evocation of the playing of Stevenson's friend Bernard Roberts:
Lovely chromatic Mozart, talk to me
in your language of intimate, arithmetical
progression.
Stevenson, who herself trained as a pianist, effortlessly deploys the technical language of musical analysis in fixing the sonata's effects. But who can inhabit for long this perfect Pythagorean realm? Elsewhere in the world, as the twentieth century wearily winds to its end,
An uninhabited body is
slashed and displayed on a pole. It's not unusual
for flesh to be pummelled, pistol-whipped,
groin-kicked, machine-gunned under arrest.
In a double-edged closure, the poet seems first to turn on Mozart: "We accuse you, Herr Mozart, of not representing our age". But then the poetry deftly changes direction again: it's not Mozart's fault that we have failed to create a world in which human beings of different races and creeds can live side by side. In the end, his music is our accuser:
Simplified, rarefied, perfectionist as ever,
punish us in the key of F Major.
Stevenson and her husband, Peter Lucas, divide their domestic lives between homes in Durham and North Wales. Their cottage in Cwm Nantcol sits beneath a louring outcrop of the Rhinogs populated by a majestically horned tribe of wild goats. These are "rocky acres" that Robert Graves, another immigrant poet of passionate intellect, would have delighted in. It's a Janus-faced country:
Its ancient stumps of mountains have survived hundreds of millions of years of drifting across oceans, being folded in and out of land masses, carved by ice after ice age. The place puts us in our place. In bad weather its stormy blackness can weigh upon the spirit something awful. But when this great Cwm, as the geologist Adam Sedgwick saw it, floods with sunlight, it's a dazzling green – or in the fall and winter, burnished copper.
Stevenson has chronicled the seasons and moods of this desolately beautiful valley and its inhabitants, animal and human, in a series of memorable poems in Granny Scarecrow and its predecessor, Four and a Half Dancing Men (1993). Like Wordsworth, she is fascinated by mountains, mists, rocks and stones, but unlike him her poetic reach takes in geology and fossil remains. Her touch can be light, as in "Morning Exercise":
Behind the barn, fog-feathered grass
scatters a sopping largesse.
Is that a line of sheep? No, marsh meadowsweet
slipping a vein of cloud over iron brown peat.
Or it can be thrilling, as in "An Angel", a poem which vividly recreates – emotion recollected in tranquillity – a visionary encounter as the poet lay on her bed following a long drive west into Wales
...I watched two gothic panels draw apart.
Between them loomed an angel,
tall as a caryatid, wingless,
draped like Michelangelo's sybil,
Never have I felt so profoundly looked into.
The Welsh poems are buttressed on either side in this book by contrasting sections, the first containing poems inspired by recollections of childhood, the second dominated by elegies and gifts for fellow poets. Both groups combine Stevenson's characteristic toughness – ruthlessness, even – with an instinctive sympathy. "Arioso Dolente" opens with an energetic memory of her mother:
Mother, 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 'showbiz inanity,
democracy twisted, its high ideals sold up!'
Cancer filched her voice, then cut her throat.
No poet worth her salt can stay away long from the subjects of love and death, and both – though perhaps especially death – are likely to bring the best out of Anne Stevenson. I persist in thinking that these poems will be worth reading when more fashionable and slighter voices have subsided into the background hum of noise that is always with us.
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