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Anne Stevenson is a familiar name to many writers and
readers in the region. Born in England of American parents,
Anne grew up in the USA but has lived in England for
most of her adult life. She has published collections
of poetry as well as critical works, the most controversial
of which was her biography of Sylvia Plath, Bitter
Fame (1989). Her book Granny
Scarecrow is published by Bloodaxe Books and
was shortlisted for the Whitbread prize in 2000.
Anne first came to the North East as a Northern Literary
Fellow at the Universities of Newcastle and Durham in
the early 1980s and she has remained attached to and
inspired by the region and by Durham and its surrounding
areas. Anne plans to use the award to support travel
to research and develop her new work and hopes to get
to grips with German and Italian to widen her reading
of other poetic texts.
Poet Laureate Andrew Motion commented: “For many
years Anne’s poems have delighted her readers
– and the work she has produced in recent years,
and which we have every reason to believe will continue
during the period of the award, shows her writing better
than ever.”
Pat Barker concurs: “Now at the age of 69, her
creativity undimmed and her craftsmanship enhanced by
age, she is on the brink of a particularly interesting
and productive period.”
Anne’s most recent book, A
Report from the Border, was published by Bloodaxe
Books in January 2003 to coincide with her 70th birthday.
Since receiving the award Anne has begun to write verse
adaptations of plays and short stories as well as poetry.
She lives in Durham city.
(An old lady aged ninety, crippled and depressed in
a nursing home, finds an alternative life for herself
in her dreams.)
The little bomb lay between them on the table where,
sitting apart from the guests, they were making sandwiches
and arranging them on a white oval platter with a rim
of red, white and blue sailboats. A clipper ship at
the centre of the platter was disappearing under the
sandwiches, so that the concentration needed to arrange
them – smoked salmon, ham and pickle on rye, cream
cheese and cress – drew them together, but she
was still not sure she knew him well enough to ask about
the bomb. A memento from the Second War, certainly,
and she hoped fervently it had been the last big war,
but she understood vaguely that it was there, too, for
her protection, a present from the airlines.
The summer party was already in full swing. Gathered
into groups that now and then released peals of silvery
laughter, the women wore floating chiffons, the men,
white linen suits and straw boaters. An old fashioned
English garden party. Margaret, Bruce’s mother,
was ladling out Pimm's from the fruity depths of a punch
bowl, a string quartet was silently in action on the
terrace, the sun was laying familiar, bushy shadows
on the lawn. As for the bomb, it looked like a toy.
Its shiny metal casing – was it tinfoil? –
pointed upward from a leaden base, painted orange. The
whole of it was no bigger than her forearm, nothing
to be afraid of, but now she was alone with it –
he must be passing around the sandwiches – she
noticed a flame flickering in a sort of cage, as if
for lift off. If only she knew something about time
bombs, or was it a rocket? Now it was making little
grinding noises, like a flint lighter. What should she
do? She must keep calm, not raise the alarm, but act.
Surprisingly, it wasn’t heavy at all. Grasping
it, holding it out well away from her filmy white dress,
she set off, running across the stony pasture for the
lake. The obvious place to put out a bomb was the lake,
though the path was much rougher than she remembered.
And the fire in the little bomb was spreading. She would
have to drop it, wherever she was, and hope to escape
before it exploded. There, she was away and scrambling
up a stony path in the cliff face…
Where had the sun come from? A June morning. Light
already. Squinting at the alarm clock on her bedside
locker, she saw that it was only a quarter to six. There
was time to finish the dream if she could get back into
it. Shutting her eyes, she looked for the path again,
and for the lake, but all that remained was the faintly
erotic spell of the scene that should have been a nightmare
but wasn't. None of the dreams that flowed into and
enlivened her nights, now that her days were spent in
identical torpor, were nightmares. Why? Shouldn't she
be scared to death of dying?
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