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Stone Milk, Anne Stevenson, 2007, Bloodaxe Books. £7.95  ISBN  978-1-8522477-5-1

 
Anne Stevenson’s 14th collection, Stone Milk, exhibits her characteristic wit and fury in musical, exquisite-sounding, sometimes outspoken poems governed by a passionate intelligence. The poems cover a range of subjects – myth, the environment, the state of the world, philosophy, ageing, survival and death. The emphasis on sounds and music in her writing is remarkable and extremely pleasurable. 

Born in Cambridge, England, 1933 of American parents, she grew up in the U.S. but has lived in Britain most of her adult life. Throughout her work, she displays a hybrid’s aptitude for relating to both places. Stevenson has a Cassandra quality, passionate and questioning, and is willing to risk hard answers to difficult questions. Like many poets today, she especially castigates the way we humans are destroying our environment. “… I can remember / wooded fells loud with waterfalls / and curlews crying in the marsh / that was once a lake” (The Blackbird at Pwllymarch). At the same time, she declares “Nostalgia, the poet’s pitfall!” (A Lament for the Makers). Indeed, advice she doesn’t always heed in this collection. 

A Lament for the Makers, one of the four sections in the book, is a 21-page experimental sequence investigating the dramas of an underworld of poets, British and American, many of them her contemporaries who have now passed away. It is interesting to have Stevenson’s angle on this subject as she summons up a host of great poets – some long dead, others who have died more recently. This long piece is never dull as she dialogues with herself: “So, on which tangle of hopes, / in whose memory / shall I reverently place a wreath? // On MacCaig’s or Bunting’s, / Silkin’s or Donaghy’s, / Bill Scammell’s? Ric Caddel’s?” There’s something quite foreboding about her next stanza: “There are quite enough / poets in hell, / quite enough excellent poets. / / Miss Moore, Miss Millay. / Miss Beer, Miss Bishop. / Anne Ridler of deep belief.” 

Stevenson is critical of ‘Creative Writing’ and its artistic claims, even the poets’ claim ‘for equal acclaim and power’. As she reminds, “Most of what we write / time will erase”. The book is imbued with a kind of brilliant pessimism, largely due to her being so preoccupied by deaths, death and dying – for death is the great leveller. At the same time, she does celebrate our common humanity and the importance of poetry. But the bleakness is always there. 

In the second section of the book, she gives us poems of the everyday with family, ageing and dying, constant themes. In the poem titled Stone Milk, she stakes her life on an Eden of simplicity where the stones are a comfort. (“If stones could be milked, these fleeting rivers of melt / would feed us like flowering trees”). Then she continues in what is a central poem in the book: 

But naturally what I want and need and expect is to be loved.
So why, as I grow older, when I lift up my eyes to the hills –
   raw deserts that they are –
do they comfort me (not always but sometimes)
   with the pristine beauty of my almost absence?
Not the milk of kindness, but the milk of stones
   is food I’m learning to long for.

These words, “the pristine beauty of my almost absence”, point to an acceptance of death, even in a way, a longing for it. 

Her poem Inheriting my Grandmother’s Nightmare notes “the adhesiveness of things / to the ghosts that prized them, / the ‘olden days’ of birthday spoons / and silver napkin rings”. And as the poem develops, she gives other images of her grandmother’s plight in ageing, “ignored by the dinner guests / hour after candlelit hour” and finally how “She died in ’55, paralysed, helpless.” All this is ruthlessly held up to the light. In Beach Kites, one of the most successful poems in the book, Stevenson wryly notes how the courting game has changed very little over the years:

(the) strong men steering their wild umbilical toys

away from the girlfriends in the car park, who
leathered from heel to neck in steel-studded black,
headscarfed against the wind, seem coolly resigned
to an old dispensation, a ritual of mating
that puts up again with the cliff-hanging habits of boys.
Is this a new way of writing?
The heroes off flying or fighting, the women waiting?

Food for thought, with Stevenson’s observant eye focussed as always, on the ironies. 

The book’s third section has Dedications, written to celebrate the 70th birthdays of the poet-dedicatees (Stewart Conn, John Lucas and Michael Standen). These are sharply written pieces, with a whiff of cynicism. Again, 75-year-old Stevenson files her years, tersely reminding these septuagenarians how things are no longer “what they used to be”. ‘‘ ‘I-pod’ is a hideous word, / While ‘mobile phone’, although euphonious, / Chirps from its ambulant nest like a digital bird”. (Listen to the Words, A “fully interactive poetry experience” for John Lucas at 70).   

The poems in the first three sections of this book are alertly intelligent and poised. We are touched and admire Stevenson’s versatility in pieces that are contemporary in tone, sometimes angry, barbed. Still, among the mordant satire, there is quite a lot of wit and playfulness batting off the gloom. 

By contrast, in the fourth section of the book – shock – the ironically minded Stevenson offers us The Myth of Medea. The notes explain that it was written in 2003-4 (and revised in 2006) as a libretto for a short opera, and it appears in this book in a more extended form as ‘an entertainment’. I found this piece a disappointing incursion into the collection – the tone feels shaky and wrong, an experiment gone awry, perhaps? It is an attempt to ‘modernise’ Euripides’ Medea, giving it a feminist slant. This is underlined in the opening Overture by arguments about the play’s title placard, beginning with The Myth of Medea, changed to The Official Myth of Medea at which Euripides angrily scrawls The Medea by Euripides. The arguments continue with Medea justifying herself and her actions as she questions how she is seen by the Choruses, Jason, Euripides, Creon et al. Here’s a taster… 

Medea (to Chorus):  Bull! I thought you were my friends! 
                                Don’t you see that every ugly thing you’ve 
                                                                          heard about me –
                                My every wicked deed, so called, and treachery –  
                                All are inventions of ambitious men?  
                                Men like Euripides and Jason – who are terrified of women! 

Euripides attempts to intervene and after she’s gone on a bit longer he says:

                                Dear lady, you haven’t read me. 
                                Twenty-four centuries of scholarship confirm 
                                My reputation for sympathy with women.
(To the Chorus)        She’s crazy!

Another riposte from Medea and so it goes, with twists on the original story and more arguments with Euripides. Later we have Jason calmly saying after the news of the death of his and Medea’s children (and her contrite admission that they are all in “this sunless Nowhere, … Hades!”): “Never mind, Medea, we’ll pull through this somehow. By Hades, I could do with some coffee and a shower.” Yes…