Collected Poems

Anne Stevenson (1933-2020) was born in England of American parents, and grew up in the US. She settled in Britain in 1964, living in Cambridge, Scotland, Oxford, the Welsh Borders, and latterly in North Wales and Durham. Her many awards included a $200,000 Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award for Poetry and the Neglected Masters Award from the Poetry Foundation of Chicago. As well as many poetry collections, she published a biography of Sylvia Plath (1989), two books of essays, Between the Iceberg and the Ship (1998) and About Poems and how poems are not about (Bloodaxe, 2017), and two critical studies of Elizabeth Bishop’s work, most recently Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop (Bloodaxe, 2006). Her Collected Poems (Bloodaxe, 2023) supersedes Poems 1955-2005 (2005), with the addition of poems from her final three collections, Stone Milk (2007), Astonishment (2012) and Completing the Circle (2020).

17 Note on the text
20 Source texts

from Living in America (1965)
23 The Traveller
24 The Women
24 To My Daughter in a Red Coat
25 Living in America
26 Harvard
26 Fairy Tale
27 In Winter
28 Love
29 The Garden of Intellect
30 Dreaming of Immortality in a Thatched Hut
30 Two Quatrains
31 Still Life in Utah
31 Nightmare in North Carolina
32 Nuns
32 Ann Arbor (A Profile)
34 In March
34 After Her Death
35 Apology
35 The Dear Ladies of Cincinnati
37 Opera Piece
37 Sierra Nevada
39 The Grey Land

from Reversals (1970)
43 ‘Birth’
44 Reversals
44 Aubade
45 Sous-entendu
45 On Not Being Able to Look at the Moon
46 Two Love Poems
47 In the House
49 The Spirit Is Too Blunt an Instrument
49 Stabilities
50 The Victory
50 The Suburb
51 The Loss
52 New York
52 The Watchers
53 The Takeover
54 The Unhappened
55 Morning
55 One Sunday
56 England
58 Fen People
58 In Middle England
60 The Return
60 The Mother
61 A River
62 American Rhetoric for Scotland

from Travelling Behind Glass: Selected Poems (1974)
67 Siskin
68 Generations
69 At Thirteen
70 Coming Back to Cambridge
72 Theme with Variations
73 Five Poems of Innocence and Experience
73 The Crush
73 The Marriage
73 The Affair
73 The Demolition
75 Old Scholars
76 Travelling Behind Glass
82 On the Edge of the Island

Correspondences (1974)
83 Correspondences: A Family History in Letters

from Enough of Green (1977)
155 To Write It
155 The Sun Appears in November
156 North Sea off Carnoustie
157 The Exhibition
158 East Coast
158 Fire and the Tide
158 Summer
159 The Bench
159 Boating Pool at Night
159 Winter Flowers
159 The Lighthouse
160 Night Wind, Dundee
160 Aberdeen
161 The Mudtower
162 Path
162 With My Sons at Boarhills
164 By the Boat House, Oxford
164 Ruin
165 Posted
165 Wanted
166 Drought
166 Ragwort
166 The Minister
167 The Doctor
168 Enough of Green
169 A Summer Place
170 People Around
171 Early Rain
171 Respectable House
172 Meniscus
172 Resurrection
173 The Sirens Are Virtuous
175 In the Orchard
175 Cain
176 Temporarily in Oxford
177 The Price
177 Thales and Li Po
178 After the End of It

from Minute by Glass Minute (1982)
181 If I Could Paint Essences
182 Buzzard and Alder
182 Burnished (A Riddle)
183 Swifts
184 The Three
185 The Garden
186 Himalayan Balsam
187 At Kilpeck Church
189 Walking Early by the Wye
190 After the Fall
190 Whose Goat?
191 Giving Rabbit to My Cat Bonnie
192 The Fish Are All Sick
193 Pennine
193 Ah Babel
194 From the Men of Letters
195 Small Philosophical Poem
196 He and It (A Pathetic Fantasy)
197 The Figure in the Carpet
198 About Crying
198 Poem for a Daughter
199 The Holly and the Ivy
200 Transparencies
202 Lockkeeper’s Island
204 Earth Station
205 The Man in the Wind
206 Sonnets for Five Seasons
206 This House
206 Complaint
207 Between
207 Statis
208 The Circle

from The Fiction-Makers (1985)
211 From an Unfinished Poem
211 The Fiction-Makers
212 Making Poetry
213 Waving to Elizabeth
214 Re-reading Jane
215 The Blue Pool
216 Shale
217 A Dream of Stones
218 Where the Animals Go
219 Musician’s Widow
219 Gannets Diving
220 Ailanthus with Ghosts
221 Two Poems for Frances Horovitz
221 Red Rock Fault
222 Willow Song
224 Demolition
225 A Prayer to Live with Real People
226 Forgotten of the Foot
228 Signs
229 In the Tunnel of Summers
230 Gales
230 Spring Song
231 On Watching a Cold Woman Wade into a Cold Sea
232 Household Gods
233 November
233 Claude Glass
234 Epitaph for a Good Mouser
234 Divorcing
234 Hands
236 Dreaming of the Dead

from Winter Time (1986)
239 Jarrow
241 From the Primrose Path
242 This
243 A Love Sequence
244 The Morden Angel
245 Naming the Flowers

from The Other House (1990)
249 In the Nursery
249 The Other House
251 Talking Sense to My Senses
251 Elegy
253 What I Miss
253 Inverkirkaig
254 Icon
255 Journal Entry: Impromptu in C Minor
257 North Easter: April, 1986
258 Night Walking with Shadows
259 Night Thoughts and False Confessions
260 And even then
260 Call them Poppies
261 ‘All Canal Boat Cruises Start Here
262 Inquit Deus
263 From the Motorway
264 Stone Fig
265 Cramond
266 Celebrity
267 Eros
268 Three Poems for Sylvia Plath
268 Nightmares, Daymoths
269 Letter to Sylvia Plath
272 Hot Wind, Hard Rain
272 Seven Poems after Francis Bacon
272 1 Study for a Portrait on a Folding Bed
273 2 Study of a Dog
274 3 Three Figures and Portrait
274 4 Seated Figure
275 5 Portrait of a Lady
276 6 Triptych
276 7 Study for a Portrait of Van Gogh
277 Journal Entry: Ward’s Island
279 Little Paul and the Sea
280 Calendar

from Four and a Half Dancing Men (1993)
283 Salter’s Gate
284 From My Study
290 Cold
291 Brueghel’s Snow
292 Four and a Half Dancing Men
293 Washing the Clocks
294 Negatives
296 The Professor’s Tale
297 Hans Memling’s Sibylla Sambetha (1480)
297 Politesse
299 A Quest
300 Trinity at Low Tide
301 Visits to the Cemetery of the Long Alive
301 Hadrian’s
301 A Sepia Garden
304 Bloody Bloody
306 Black Hole
307 Lost
307 A Tricksy June
308 To witness pain is a different form of pain
309 Binoculars in Ardudwy
310 When the camel is dust it goes through the needle’s eye
311 Painting It In
312 Late
313 Terrorist
314 Two Poems for John Cole and One for Annabel Cole
314 Dinghy
315 Cambrian
316 After You Left

from The Collected Poems 1955-1995 (1996)
318 Occasional verses
318 The Parson and the Romany
319 Ballad of the Made Maid

from Granny Scarecrow (2000)
I
323 Vertigo
323 Innocence and Experience
324 The White Room
325 A Surprise on the First Day of School
326 Going Back
328 John Keats, 1821–1950
329 Arioso Dolente
331 ‘Love Stories and a Bed of Sand’

II
332 Moonrise
332 Clydie is dead!
334 Incident
334 Suicide
335 Skills
336 An Angel
338 Granny Scarecrow
339 Freeing Lizzie
341 Phoenicurus phoenicurus
342 Pity the Birds
343 Comet
344 The Wrekin
346 False Flowers
347 Kosovo Surprised by Mozart
348 Leaving
349 Old Wife’s Tale
349 On Going Deaf
350 A Luxury
352 Oysters
353 To witness pain is a different form of pain
353 The Theologian’s Confession
354 Whistler’s Gentleman by the Sea

III
355 A Parable for Norman
357 Poem for Harry Fainlight
358 Invocation and Interruption
360 A Present
361 The Name of the Worm
363 The Miracle of Camp 60
366 A Ballad for Apothecaries
370 Postscriptum

from A Report from the Border (2003)
373 Who’s Joking with the Photographer?
374 The Writer in the Corner
375 Washing My Hair
376 Two Poems for Nerys Johnson
376 Portrait of the Artist in an Orthopaedic Halo Crowned with Flowers
376 Passing Her House
378 Red Hot Sex
379 Haunted
380 Passifloraceae
380 A Marriage
381 Hearing with My Fingers
382 At the Grave of Ezra Pound
383 Skin Deep
384 Cashpoint Charlie
385 A Hot Night in New York
385 New York Is Crying
387 A Cradle of Fist
388 Clovenhoof ’s-bane
388 A Report from the Border
389 Branch Line
390 A Tourists’ Guide to the Fens
391 Carol of the Birds
392 To Phoebe
393 Questionable
393 Prophylactic Sonnets
395 The Inn

Some Poems from Cwm Nantcol
396 The Wind, the Sun and the Moon
396 The Unaccommodated
397 Under Moelfre
398 Why Take Against Mythology? (1)
398 Why Take Against Mythology? (2)
399 Attacking the Waterfall
400 Spring Poem
401 Without Me
402 May Bluebells, Coed Aber Artro
403 Green Mountain, Black Mountain

from Poems 1955-2005 (2005)
412 A Riddle for Peter Scupham
412 In the Weather of Deciduous Souls
413 An Impenitent Ghost
413 Fool’s Gold
414 17.14 Out of Newcastle
415 It looks so simple from a distance…
416 Four Grim Fairy Tales
416 1 Rapunzel
416 2 Sleeping Beauty
417 3 Was Cinderella Ever Happy?
417 4 If Wishes Were Fishes
418 Christmas Comfort and the Green Man
421 Toy
419 As I Lay Sleeping
420 Killing Spiders
420 Melon meaning melon
421 Toy
422 Variations on a Line by Peter Redgrove

from Stone Milk (2007)
424 Prelude from Piers Plowman
425 A Lament for the Makers
447 Near the End of a Day
448 Stone Milk
449 Before Eden
451 The Enigma
452 Waving Goodbye
452 Orcop
453 Inheriting My Grandmother’s Nightmare
454 An Even Shorter History of Nearly Everything
456 Jet Lag
456 City Lights
456 Beach Kites
458 The Blackbird at Pwllymarch

from Astonishment (2012)
I
461 The Loom
462 Constable Clouds and a Kestrel’s Feather
463 Bird in Hand
464 Teaching My Sons to Swim in Walden Pond
467 Night Thoughts
468 Paper
470 On Line
472 An Exchange in the Time Bank

II Sonnets and Variations
473 It’s astonishing
473 Doppler
474 After the Funeral
474 Elegy: In Coherent Light
475 The Miracle of the Bees and the Foxgloves
475 The Master and His Cast
476 Not a Hook, Not a Shelf, Maybe a Song?
476 How it is
477 The Voice
477 Caring More Than Caring
478 Carols in King’s

III Ardudwy
479 ‘Wind from the North…’
480 Night Snow
480 Thaw
481 Spring Diary
481 Arrival Dream
481 Snow Squalls
481 North Easter
482 A Clearer Memory
482 Then like a present
483 On Harlech Beach
484 Drench
484 On Reflection
485 October Song
485 Goat Cull in Cwm Nancol
486 Roses in December

IV
487 Photographing Change
488 In the Museum of Floating Bodies and Flammable Souls
488 All Those Attempts in the Changing Room
490 Tulips
492 The Password
493 Five Poems in Memory of a Marriage
493 A Match
493 After Words
493 Hotel New Year
494 Epitaph for a Hedonist
494 A Visit
496 Demeter and Her Daughter
500 Spring Again
500 Notes

from Completing the Circle (2020)
507 Preface
511 Saying the World

I
512 Anaesthesia
512 Poppy Day
514 Sandi Russell Sings
515 Defeating the Gloom Monster
517 A Dream of Guilt
518 Improvisation
519 Completing the Circle
520 Ann Arbor Days
521 The Day
522 Choose to be a Rainbow

II
523 How Poems Arrive
524 Dover Beach Reconsidered
525 The Bully Thrush
526 Winter Idyll from My Back Window
527 Goodbye & Cheers
527 Shared
528 Voice Over
528 Candles
529 A Compensation of Sorts
530 After Wittgenstein
531 Now We Are 80
534 An Old Poet’s View from the Departure Platform

III
535 As the Past Passes
535 The Gift Bowl
538 Pronunciation
543 At 85
544 Notes

Appendices
546 Index of titles and first lines
557 Selected bibliography
559 Biographical note