Voyages over Voices is the first book length critical exploration of the internationally acclaimed American-British poet Anne Stevenson. A past winner of the The Poetry Foundation's Neglected Masters Award, the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award for Poetry and the Northern Rock FoundationWriter's Award, Stevenson has long been admired by poets and critics alike as one of the most important contemporary poets on either side of the Atlantic. Angela Leighton brings together a distinguished list of contributors, including Jay Parini, Carol Rumens, Tim Kendall and John Lucas, in a collection that provides a significant and invaluable contribution to understanding Stevenson's work as poet and critic. Voyages over Voices will be requiredreading for scholars contemporary British and American poetry.

Though Plath has become a modern legendary figure, this is the first fully informed account of her life as a poet. With new material of all sorts, Stevenson recounts the struggle between fantasy and reality that blessed the artist but placed a curse on the woman. Photos.

This collection of one of Americas great poets contains all the poetry that Bishop published in her lifetime, an extensive selection of unpublished poems and drafts, and all her published poetic translations as well as her essential published prose.

British poetry is enjoying a period of exceptional richness and variety. This is exciting but it's also confusing, and throws up the need for an enthusiastic guide that can explain and celebrate the many parallel poetry projects now underway. Beyond the Lyric does just that. This is a book of enthusiasms: an intelligent and witty map of contemporary British poetry and a radical, accessible guide to living British poets, grouped for the first time according to the kind of poetry they write. In a series of groundbreaking new classifications, beginning with the bread-and-butter diction of the Plain Dealers and ending on the capacious generosity of the Exploded Lyric, it examines the broad range of contemporary tendencies – from the baroque swagger of the Dandies to the restrained elegance of the Oxford Elegists; from the layered, haunting verse of Mythopoesis to the inventive explorations of the New Formalists. By probing the cultural context from which these groups emerge and shifting the critical focus back to the work itself, Sampson’s astute analysis illuminates and demystifies each of these terms and asks the big questions about what makes a poem. The result is a celebration of poetry as a connected, responsive and above all communitarian form. Lively, engaging and inviting, this is the indispensible and authoritative guide for anyone who's ever wondered what's going on in British poetry today.

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.

A collection of essays on Elizabeth Bishop drawing on work presented at the first UK Elizabeth Bishop confrence, held at Newcastle University. It brings together papers by both academic critics and leading poets, including Michael Donaghy, Vicki Feaver, Deryn Rees-jones and Anne Stevenson.