Description

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).