A poet even more essentially transatlantic than Logan, Stevenson was born in England, raised and educated in the US, and has been living in various parts of Britain since the sixties. Poems 1955-2005 draws from thirteen publications since 1965, as well as from some early and late uncollected work. The poems are arranged thematically rather than chronologically, which was at first quite irritating (it is almost a reflexive response to want to compare early and late work) but grew on me. While I hesitate to imply Stevenson’s writing has been static, she maintains a consistent sensibility and clustered interests that are able to make thematic categorizations work as more than curiosities. There aren’t many poets who could profitably mix up work spanning fifty years, but she can.

Stevenson has written alertly on Sylvia Plath (she’s Plath’s age, but didn’t start publishing until after Plath’s death) and Elizabeth Bishop, and has obviously gone to school on them in her own work. She has something of Bishop’s patrician sequencing of observation and, less reliably, Plath’s way of pogo-sticking from word to word. More socially constituted than either of these poets, she possesses a charity that neither of them had, and suffers from an excess of consciousness that neither of them had either. I say “suffers” because the excess often manifests itself as literary mannerism or a chattiness of tone that does not entrain itself to the formal or dramatic requirements of the poem. Her challenge, generally speaking, is disciplining this excess. Her loose voice sounds like this:

For what traveller or exile, mesmerised by the sun
Or released by spaciousness from habitual self-denial,
Recalls without wistfulness its fine peculiarities
Or remembers with distaste its unique, vulnerable surfaces?

—From England

Compare this to:

A field of barley, feathered;
a fen full of sky-blue butterfly flax,
undulations like the ocean’s

rolling right up to the cameraman’s
pollen-dusted loafers.
And when Anthea sets up her easel

to catch in watercolour
a picturesque angle of the almshouses,
she scrupulously omits

electrical wiring and TV paraphernalia
that, in strange time, connect her to
“the brutish, uncivilized tempers of these parts” ...

—From A Tourists’ Guide to the Fens

When in the latter mode, Stevenson’s wry-but-not-bitter worldliness (it’s striking how much she resembles Mona Van Duyn in this quality) is expansive enough for public elegy, light verse, social satire—there’s something eighteenth-century about it. It just doesn’t seem to lose its footing. Usually poets’ most ambitious work is their worst, but Stevenson’s jewel is the 1974 Correspondences, an extended portrait of a Yankee family based on a trove of letters Stevenson discovered at Radcliffe. She shows in these pieces a talent, not otherwise much on display, for mimicry—the voices throughout are distinctly and plausibly old, young, male, female, northern, southern, English, American, grave, flippant, and of their time. As technique, it is impressive; as an act of empathy, it is broad and sustained in a way that any one lyric cannot be. Her strongest short poems (I would nominate “Gannets Diving,” “The Women,” “Forgotten of the Foot,” “Skills,” “American Rhetoric for Scotland,” “The White Room,” “Elegy,” “The Traveller,” and “Willow Song”) occur early, middle, and late. But whatever the case for the poems in it, the book compounds its successes in being a deep record of a robust and elastic sensibility, and in delivering us another not-so-minor Atlantic Goethe.

— D. H. Tracy