A Report from the Border

Anne Stevenson's new collection crosses many borders. While her title-poem mocks borders dividing rich nations from poor, its subtext undermines the public language of political self-justification, suggesting that the true dimensions of morality can be approached best through literature.

These poems of Stevenson's are sharp-eyed and -witted, rhythmically adroit, and as informed by poetic tradition and contemporary consciousness as any in English. Nearing 70, Stevenson often considers the sorrows of age, especially when commemorating an artist confined to a wheelchair, her parents, a poet suicide, and Ezra Pound. But however age-conscious, Stevenson isn't ponderous. One poem about the crippled artist, set in an assisted-living residence, has her cannily note the "Red Hot Sex" passing between others more physically impaired than she and also welling up from the red tulip she is painting. In "Hearing with My Fingers," after buying a house with a piano in it, the poet discovers the music learned long ago resurfacing, thanks to fingers "gullied with veiny skin, / [that] want to go back and teach my eyes to listen, / my heart to see." In three "Prophylactic Sonnets," experience speaks to impulsive youth as charmingly as Jane Austen in the quotation that introduces them. As for the border from which Stevenson reports, it is, in the poems mentioned, between age and youth, life and death, desire and capacity, experience and impulse, and also between Stevenson's two homes, New England and Wales, celebrated in the long, concluding poem "Green Mountain, Black Mountain." Ray Olson
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