Description
Book SynopsisThe poems of Stone Milk address the way the written word preserves yet distorts the lives depending on it for fame or survival. Anne Stevenson’s highly engaging new collection opens with A Lament for the Makers, an experimental sequence based on medieval dream poetry that plays with a Dante-inspired yet modern, scientific vision of an underworld of poets. This is followed by a series of shorter poems, mostly related to ageing and the prospect (even the comfort) of dying. The Myth of Medea ends the book on a note both stoic and merry, despite its frank look at the reality of death. Stevenson rewrites the myth as an ‘entertainment’ to be set to music – her own original take on how ancient, classical stories are reinterpreted by societies that inherit and retell them.
Trade ReviewWhile Anne Stevenson is most certainly, and rightly, regarded as one of the major poets of our period, it has never been by virtue of this or that much anthologised poem, but by the work or mind as a whole. It is not so much a matter of the odd lightning-struck tree as of an entire landscape, and that landscape is always humane, intelligent and sane, composed of both natural and rational elements, and amply furnished with patches of wit and fury, which only serve to bring out the humanity. -- George Szirtes * London Magazine *
