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Over thirty years ago, when Eugene Dubnov was mulling over a
doctoral thesis on Mandelstam, I first read his poetry, and was
astonished that such a genuine talent was subordinating itself to
analysing others' talents. But a Russian poet in post-Soviet space
or exile has few of the paths to recognition available to an
earlier generation - being imprisoned, shot or deported. At last,
however, we have Dubnov at his best, and with each poem beautifully
mirrored in English, too. It is still clear that he is an heir to
Mandelstam (and to Joseph Brodsky, as well), but his is an original
voice, moulding the Russian language with finesse and sensitivity.
- Professor Donald Rayfield, University of London.
Anne Stevenson (1933-2020) was a major American and British poet.
Born in Cambridge of American parents, she grew up in the States
but lived in Britain for most of her adult life. Rooted in close
observation of the world and acute psychological insight, her poems
continually question how we see and think about the world. They are
incisive as well as entertaining, marrying critical rigour with
personal feeling, and a sharp wit with an original brand of serious
humour. Her posthumously published Collected Poems is a remaking of
Anne Stevenson’s earlier Poems 1955-2005 (Bloodaxe Books, 2005),
expanded to include poems from her final three books, Stone Milk
(2007), Astonishment (2012) and Completing the Circle (2020),
drawing on sixteen collections which are presented in their
original order of publication.
'In the Orchard' is not so much a collection of poems about birds
as a book of memories and rare moments in which a number of
familiar birds have played a spark-like role in bringing poems
about. They are chiefly lyrical in character and range in time from
'Resurrection' written over fifty years ago to recent poems like
'The Bully Thrush', but they are not ordered chronologically and
shouldn't be associated with events in the poet's private life. The
etchings by Alan Turnbull are the result of his patient and
painstaking study of each bird as it relates to the poem in which
it appears.
Global public health has improved vastly during the past 25 years, and especially in the survival of infants and young children. However, many of these children, particularly in Africa, continue to live in poverty and in unhealthy, unsupportive environments, and will not be able to meet their developmental potential. In other words, they will survive but not thrive. The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) stress sustainable development, not just survival and disease reduction, and the Global Strategy for Women’s, Children’s and Adolescents’ Health proposes a Survive (end preventable deaths), Thrive (ensure health and wellbeing) and Transform (expand enabling environments) agenda. For children to thrive they must make good developmental progress from birth until the end of adolescence.
Addressing the social determinants of developmental problems, this volume offers a broad, contextualised understanding of the factors that impact on children and adolescents in Africa. Unlike other works on the subject it is Africa-wide in its scope, with case studies in Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Rwanda and South Africa. Covering mental health as well as physical and social development, it looks at policies and practice, culture and priorities for research, identifying challenges and proposing solutions.
Recommended for academics, students and practitioners in psychology, including developmental psychology, child clinical psychology, developmental psychopathology, psychiatry, human ecology, and in schools of education. It will also be of interest to nurses and paediatricians, health workers and those interested in early childhood development.
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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Stone Milk (Paperback)
Anne Stevenson
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R243
R198
Discovery Miles 1 980
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The 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.
In this innovative series of public lectures at Newcastle
University, leading contemporary poets speak about the craft and
practice of poetry to audiences drawn from both the city and the
university. The lectures are then published in book form by
Bloodaxe, giving readers everywhere the opportunity to learn what
the poets themselves think about their own subject. Anne Stevenson
argues that change is time's one permanent condition, that it
continually transforms the present into the past at the very moment
it opens the future to further change. She also argues that without
an understanding of how poetry has re-invented itself through its
history, today's present innovations are likely to remain rootless
and unnourished. Drawing on lines from her own poem, 'The Fiction
Makers' - 'They thought they were living now/ But they were living
then' - Stevenson traces the theories, fashions and beliefs of
modern poets in America and Britain since the 1930s (the span, in
fact, of her own lifetime). Giving special attention to the voices
of T.S.Eliot, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop and
Wallace Stevens, she shows how, after World War II, populist
movements in the United States rose up against a university-based
establishment, introducing a barbarian energy into the art while at
the same time destroying its solid base in traditional rhythm and
form. Each lecture features poets she considers to be among the
most effective of their kind, ranging from W.B. Yeats, Robert
Lowell and Richard Wilbur, to Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery and Denise
Levertov. In her final lecture, she quotes extensively from friends
and contemporaries recently deceased: G.F. Dutton, Frances
Horovitz, William Martin, and finishing with a tribute to the voice
and ear of Seamus Heaney. To the three texts of her 2016
Newcastle/Bloodaxe Lectures Stevenson has conjoined additional
essays originally given as talks in the Chapel of St Chad's College
in the University of Durham. These have mainly to do with rhythms
and sounds rather than with subject-matter, arguing that, until
very recently, it was a defining virtue of poetry not to be about
anything that could better or more clearly be said in prose.Finally
Stevenson, having had a number of second thoughts about Bitter
Fame, her biography of Sylvia Plath (1989), includes a talk on this
American poet's astonishing gift and tragic life, first given at
Ledbury Poetry Festival in 2013.
Anne Stevenson's Completing the Circle is a swansong collection of
moving elegies and celebrations written in her 80s during the early
decades of what she calls in her preface, 'a newly transformed,
already terrifying century'. Most of these poems look back on her
past from 'the viewpoint of a bewildered survivor facing up to the
realities of time passing and beloved contemporaries dying'. In
common with much of her work - and fittingly for this wide-ranging
book of remembrance - she manages to maintain a tone that is
serious without being funereal, acquiescent without indulging in
confessional despair, keeping personal self-pity at bay with a
characteristic detachment that can quietly slip into wit. The
title-poem, while it owes a debt to Rilke, essentially expresses
the poet's own long-considered belief that 'death naturally and
rightly completes the cycle we recognise and accept as life'.
Completing the Circle is Anne Stevenson's 16th collection, her
third since her much praised Bloodaxe retrospective Poems
1955-2005. It follows two other late collections, Stone Milk (2007)
and Astonishment (2012).
Commissioned by the Intergovernmental Meeting (IGM) of the
Asia-Pacific Network for Global Change Research (APN), this book
offers a detailed survey of the current status of climate change
and climate variability in the Asia-Pacific region, a thorough and
thoughtful assessment of climate and security and clear
recommendations on the best paths of climate research in the
future.
Commissioned by the Intergovernmental Meeting (IGM) of the
Asia-Pacific Network for Global Change Research (APN), this book
offers a detailed survey of the current status of climate change
and climate variability in the Asia-Pacific region, a thorough and
thoughtful assessment of climate and security and clear
recommendations on the best paths of climate research in the
future.
This unique and beautiful collection of poems, written from the
depths of a mother's broken heart, will touch and comfort others
suffering the most devastating loss of all, the death of a child. A
year and a half after the tragic loss of her son, poetry started
flowing through her. The release of her pain and anguish provided
through this amazing outpouring helped facilitate her healing, and
is offered here to help others heal. Giving words to a grief that
has no words, she will touch your heart. Those suffering similar
loss will find hope and strength in her poems.
Elizabeth Bishop is one of the greatest and most influential
American poets of the 20th century. First published in hardback in
1998, "Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop" is a highly illuminating
reader's guide written by another leading poet, which makes full
use of the letters Elizabeth Bishop wrote to Anne Stevenson from
Brazil in the 1960s. Anne Stevenson is a major American and British
poet who has published many books of poetry, including her "Poems
1955-2005" in 2005. Her other books include "Bitter Fame: A Life of
Sylvia Plath" (1989), the first critical study of "Elizabeth
Bishop" (1966), and a book of essays, "Between the Iceberg and the
Ship" (1998). Each of her five chapters looks at a different aspect
of Bishop's art. "In the Waiting Room" links her life-long search
for self-placement to her unsettled childhood. "Time's Andromeda"
shows how a youthful fascination with 17th-century baroque art
ripened, in the 1930s, into a unique brand of metaphysical
surrealism. "Living with the Animals" considers ways in which
Bishop, like Walt Whitman, deserted the literary mode of the fable
to give autonomy and authority to natural creatures. Two final
chapters focus on the poet's Darwinian acceptance of evolutionary
change and her steady look at the 'geographical mirror' that in her
later work replaced the figure of the looking-glass as an emblem of
imagination. "Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop" represents a view of
her work Bishop herself would have recognised and approved. A
chronology and a set of maps serve as practical guides to the
poet's life and travels.
Anne Stevenson (1933-2020) was a major American and British poet.
Born in Cambridge of American parents, she grew up in the States
but has lived in Britain for most of her adult life. Rooted in
close observation of the world and acute psychological insight, her
poems continually question how we see and think about the world.
They are incisive as well as entertaining, marrying critical rigour
with personal feeling, and a sharp wit with an original brand of
serious humour. Poems 1955-2005 is a remaking of Anne Stevenson's
earlier Collected Poems (Oxford University Press), drawing on over
a dozen previous collections as well as new poems, with this book's
new thematic arrangements emphasising the craft, coherence and
architecture of her life's work. It was expanded to include poems
from her first two Bloodaxe collections, Granny Scarecrow (2000)
and A Report from the Border (2003).
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