Taking its title from Derek Walcott's line, 'The perpetual ideal is
astonishment', Anne Stevenson's 16th collection of poems looks back
over eighty years of the earth's never-ceasing turbulence, setting
clearly remembered scenes from her personal past against a
background of geographical and historical change. As always, her
chief preoccupation is with the extraordinary nature of experience
itself, and this she explores as a geologist might explore the rock
layers beneath an urban surface relied upon by the senses, yet in
the perspective of deep time acknowledged to be temporary and
passing. As a poet who has always been anxious to balance
imagination with insight and for whom the sound and shape of every
poem is integral to its meaning, Stevenson views contemporary
scientific and technological advance with a sceptic's compassion
for its ecological and human cost. While in some poems she
acknowledges her debt to writers such as Henry David Thoreau and
Henry James, she carefully points out ways in which they
anticipated the collapse of the world they valued. In others she
demonstrates that a belief in scientific method and Darwinian
evolution is in every way compatible with a sense of the sacred in
the living world. Always what is most astonishing to her is that
life exists at all, that the normal is also and amazingly the
phenomenal. And although notes of poignant sadness, together with
some witty assaults on human folly are sounded throughout this
collection, its predominant tone is one of celebration.
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