Holding Our Own : The Selected Poetry of Ann Stanford [Paperback]

Ann Stanford (Author), David Trinidad (Editor), Maxine Scates (Editor, Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 2001

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of Ann Stanford's ten books had slipped out of print and her final manuscript—completed just before she died—remained unpublished.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

Editorial Reviews

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.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* California has been the most populous and wealthiest state and the hotbed of American commercial culture for some time now but is still a province in the eyes of the literati. Thus, it isn't surprising that lifelong Californian Stanford's work was virtually out of print when she died in 1987 and wasn't revived until the small-press roundup of late poems, Dreaming the Garden (2000). This selection from that book and her three major collections, The Weathercock (1966), The Descent (1970), and In Mediterranean Air (1977), confirms the consistency of her concerns, the confidence of her craftsmanship, and the development, over time, from difficulty to radiant clarity in her poetry. Basically, she was a nature poet, convinced that living amidst the bounties of creation was intimidating, to be sure, but a privilege that obliged us to nurture nature in return for its nurturing us. The garden and classical mythology, that urtext of life in the garden, are her core subjects, which she lovingly parses to comprehend the fate of women, the evil of power, the isolation of the person, and the ubiquity of consciousness. If she isn't a major American poet, she is a permanent one, whose work shouldn't be neglected again. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press; 1 edition (May 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1556591586
• ISBN-13: 978-1556591587
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,547,303 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lovely book by a woman time should not forget, May 14, 2001

By 

joseph millar (oregon) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Holding Our Own : The Selected Poetry of Ann Stanford (Paperback)

Ann Stanford's poems are luminous with the landscapes of California, especially L.A. where she lived and worked as a writer and teacher for many years. The poems are also haunted by the encroachment of land developers as she observes and records the disappearance of those landscapes. She writes with an aching beauty of grape orchards, country roads, bouganvilla,nuthatches, hawks and horses. Her poems are straightforward meditations on loss, love, beauty, human nature and poetry. Here's an example from "Done With"

They are trampling the garden --/ My mother's lilac, my father's grapevine,/ The freesias, the jonquils, the grasses./ Hot asphalt goes down/ Over the torn stems and hardens.//

What will they do in springtime?/ Those blubs and stems groping upward/ That drown in earth under the paving,/ Thick with sap, pale in the dark/ As they try the unrolling of green.//

May they double themselves/ Pushing together up to the sunlight,/ May they break through the seal stretched above them/ Open and flower and cry we are living.//

This is a gorgeous book edited by two of her students. They have done her and us a great service in bringing these poems back into the light.