Poems 1955-2005

Starred review from January 1, 2006
This big collection gathers a poetic career of great distinction too little known in America. The poet is in fact an American, born in England and resident there and in Wales for most of her adulthood but raised in the U.S. And with generations of American heritage. Moreover, she writes with the same clarity and incisiveness about New England as about Welsh and Cumbrian landscapes, so vividly that the places are imaginatively smelt and tasted as well as seen; see the first section of this book, "The Way You Say the World." (Note, however, that despite that section title, "Prologue" includes the poems specifically concerned with the way of saying, the art of poetry.) In the present climate of opinion, it is odd that Stevenson isn't better known, too, as a preeminent poet of the family. The second section here, "Seven Ages," contains poems of the life cycle, from birth to terminal doddering, that are firmly anchored in mothers caring for children and adult children for aged parents. But then, Stevenson isn't expressly religious, though severe Calvinism heavily informs the first, nineteenth-century part of "Correspondences: A Family History in Letters," which is a veritable novel in verse of the utmost craftsmanship and interest. The concluding section, "In Memoriam," demonstrates that she is one of the most natural and intelligent contemporary elegists. No lover of poetry in English should not know Stevenson's work.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)