Holding Our Own: The Selected Poetry of Ann Stanford - Softcover

Ann Stanford

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1556591586 ISBN 13: 9781556591587

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, 2001

Synopsis

Within a decade of her death in 1987, each of Ann Stanford's ten books had slipped out of print and her final manuscript—completed just before she died—remained unpublished. Through the effort of two former students, this creeping silence will finally end with the publication of this major selected poems. Like her fellow Californians Robinson Jeffers and Gary Snyder, Stanford's poems are consumed by natural landscape and lost nature. Yet she is an urban poet, a poet of Los Angeles who published poetry, criticism, a translation of The Bhagavad Gita, and the first major anthology of women's poetry.

Listening to Color

Now that blue has had its say
has told its winds, wall, sick
sky even, I can listen to white

sweet poison flowers hedge autumn
under a sky white at the edges
like faded paper. My message keeps

turning to yellow where few leaves
set up first fires over branches
tips of flames only, nothing here finished yet.

"All she knows, though it's awesome, doesn't clog her spontaneity or impede the freshness of her senses. The whole book is brave and good."—May Swenson

"Crystalline would be the word for the illuminating clarity of Ann Stanford's poetry—except that hers is not an inorganic but a living crystal. Few poets today better exemplify the criteria of wholeness, harmony, and radiance that the great philosopher said all art should possess. Hers is an intimate but luminous vitality."—Kenneth Rexroth

"She is one of our best lyricists."—James Dickey

Ann Stanford (1916-1987) lived her whole life in Southern California. With degrees from Stanford and U.C.L.A., she taught at California State University for twenty-five years. Her books were published by Viking and the influential Swallow Press, and her poems appeared regularly in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and many other magazines.

Holding Our Own

A summer without passion
our selves pulled together
like the leaves surrounding the branches
each branch part of the tree
the tree round, holding its own in the air.

The music begins
round globes of sound
weld it togethe

About this title

About the Author:

(1916-1987). Stanford attended Stanford University, and received her Ph. D from UCLA. She received various awards for her poetry, and served as chairperson for the Pulitzer Prize Committee. She was also the poetry editor for the Los Angeles Times. Her books include The Weathercock, The Descent, In Mediterranean Air, The Women Poets in English, Anne Bradstreet: The Worldy Puritan, and others.

From Publishers Weekly:

Burgeoning orchards, bougainvillea, pomegranate, jasmine the California-born and -educated Stanford (1916-1987) drew heavily on her native flora for her tough-minded meditations, written for "beauty, harmony, joy, utopia" and championed by the likes of May Swenson. After her death, Stanford's work fell almost entirely out of print (the posthumous Dreaming the Garden is still available), which situation this collection attempts to rectify. Edited by two of Stanford's former students, David Trinidad (Plasticville; Powerless; etc.) and Maxine Scates, this labor-of-love is rightly heavy on the four later volumes of lyric poems for which Stanford was best known. Stanford was "discovered" by Yvor Winters as a Stanford undergrad and pulled into his anti-modernist circle; her early poems bear that imprint most strongly in their stentorian air and rhymes. But in her impressive final two volumes (In Mediterranean Air and Dreaming the Garden), the increasingly self-conscious poet overlays her beloved California landscape with that of the Mediterranean, melding modern memory with Renaissance epic and classical myth, meditating on the troubled space of the lyric (her ever-threatened garden), whose isolation is violated again and again. The power of these later poems with their pained contemplations, scarred remembrances and unanswered questions lies in the power of the maker to imagine worlds, however idealized: "Say/ the flowers on that hillside/ are stars/ or waves/ or tents or ribbons/ or bursts of sun// say they're light/ or courage/ or remembrance." (June) Forecast: While West Coast name recognition and sales should be strongest, fans of Amy Clampitt or Elizabeth Bishop there and elsewhere will find Standford's similar settings and sensibility congenial, if recommended to them as such.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1556591586
• ISBN 13: 9781556591587
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224
• Editor: David Trinidad, Maxine Scates