Maura Stanton's first book of poems, Snow on Snow, was published in 1975 as the seventieth installment of the Yale Series of Younger Poets; Stanley Kunitz presided as judge and wrote the introduction to the book. Michael Ryan preceded Stanton as a winner, and Carolyn Forche followed her. Although these three poets have since developed along different lines, their first books epitomize one of the prominent strains of American poetry written during the 1970s. Typically these poems depend on free verse as the dominant measure, deploy flexible stanza forms, and draw on a fund of images best and most often described as surrealistic, a hybrid poetics that Kunitz mastered in his own work.

Maura Stanton was born to Joseph Stanton, a salesman, and Wanda Haggard Stanton, a nurse, in Evanston, Illinois, on 9 September 1946; she received her B.A. from the University of Minnesota in 1969 and her M.F.A...