In the Orchard: Poems with Birds

Anne Stevenson

Enitharmon Press, 2016 - Nature - 45 pages

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.

About the author

Anne Katharine Stevenson was an American British poet and writer. She was born on January 3, 1933 in the United States. Since 1962, she has lived in the UK. She earned her undergraduate degree in Literature (1954) and a master's degree in English (1961) from the University of Michigan. She received an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from the University of Michigan in 2008. As a poet, Stevenson published 16 books, including various selected volumes and two collected editions, The Collected Poems of Anne Stevenson, 1955-1995 (1996) and Poems 1955-2005 (2005). Her last collection, Completing the Circle, was published in March 2020. Her other works included criticism, radio plays, essays, and biographies. Bitter Fame (1989) is her controversial account of the life of Sylvia Plath. She received numerous awards including, the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award for Poetry; Neglected Masters Award from the Poetry Foundation; and the Northern Rock Foundation Writer's Award. Anne Stevenson died after a short illness on September 14, 2020 in Durham, in northeast England. She was 87.

Bibliographic information

• Title: In the Orchard: Poems with Birds
• Author: Anne Stevenson
• Illustrated by: Alan Turnbull
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Enitharmon Press, 2016
• ISBN: 1910392839, 9781910392836
• Length: 45 pages
• Subjects: Nature / Animals / Birds; Poetry / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; Poetry / General