Granny Scarecrow by Anne Stevenson
Anne Stevenson has always been a restless, questioning poet whose openness has ensured that each of her many collections has been distinctive and challenging. Granny Scarecrow is characteristically full of ideas, but as always, Stevenson approaches them by looking intently at small things and seemingly insignificant events. In creating a poetry of acute psychological insight, alert to all shades of meaning, she has managed to be incisive as well as entertaining, marrying critical rigour with personal feeling, and a sharp wit with an original brand of serious humour. Anne Stevenson was trained as a musician and came to poetry with her auditory imagination already developed. For over forty years she has been writing poetry primarily to be heard and overheard. Experimenting with sounds and verse forms has encouraged experiments with subject matter, and Granny Scarecrow is brimming with ideas that - plainly to the author's amusement - contradict each other. The title-poem starts out as a simple tale about two farm girls passing their granny's dress on a scarecrow, but it opens up into an elegy for the passing of a way of life. The book as a whole stresses that looking, not thinking, makes for a poetry of compassion and communication. What the poem says - and how it sounds - is inseparable from what it is.
Stevenson's style is capable of a terse brilliance which is like moral wit, and also of a long and beautiful movement of language, but there is always the same surprising and hard-bitten objectivity about it.. She is one of the greatest women artists in the country... The stinging winter sunshine in her poems is what we need and seldom find elsewhere... In every generation one is afraid that they are not making poets like her any more -- Peter Levi * Poetry Review *
Anne Stevenson (1933-2020) was born in Cambridge, England, of American parents, and grew up in New England and Michigan. She studied music, European literature and history at the University of Michigan, returning later to read English and publishing the first critical study of Elizabeth Bishop. After several transatlantic switches, she settled in Britain in 1964, living in Cambridge, Scotland, Oxford, the Welsh Borders, and latterly in North Wales and Durham. She held many literary fellowships, and was the inaugural winner of Britain's biggest literary prize, the Northern Rock Foundation Writer's Award, in 2002. In 2007 she was awarded three major prizes in the USA: the $200,000 Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award for Poetry by the Lannan Foundation of Santa Fe, a Neglected Masters Award from the Poetry Foundation of Chicago and The Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry from The Sewanee Review in Tennessee. In 2008, The Library of America published Anne Stevenson: Selected Poems, edited by Andrew Motion, in conjunction with the Neglected Masters Award. This series is exclusively devoted to the greatest figures in American literature. Following two collections in the US in 1965 and 1969, she published her renowned family history sequence Correspondences, along with Travelling Behind Glass: Selected Poems 1963-1973, with Oxford University Press in 1974. After seven more books with OUP, she moved her publishing to Bloodaxe when OUP shut down its poetry list in 1999. In 2000 Bloodaxe reissued her OUP Collected Poems 1955-1995 at the same time as a new collection, Granny Scarecrow. These were followed by A Report from the Border (2003) and a new expanded retrospective, Poems 1955-2005 (2005), and then by three later collections, Stone Milk (2007), Astonishment (2012) and Completing the Circle (2020). As well as her numerous collections of poetry, Anne Stevenson published a biography of Sylvia Plath (1989), a book of essays, Between the Iceberg and the Ship (1998), and two critical studies of Elizabeth Bishop's work, most recently Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop (Bloodaxe Books, 2006). In 2016 she gave the Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures, published by Bloodaxe in 2017 as About Poems and how poems are not about.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781852245344 |
| ISBN 10 | 1852245344 |
| Title | Granny Scarecrow |
| Author | Anne Stevenson |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Bloodaxe Books Ltd |
| Year published | 2000-05-25 |
| Number of pages | 160 |
| Prizes | Short-listed for Whitbread Book Awards: Poetry Category 2000 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |