Anne Stevenson is one of the few contemporary poets whose writing incorporates most of the preoccupations of postmodernist poetry. She has a woman writer's necessary ambivalence about the language available to her, about the heritage which she must recognize, and about the obligations to others which either sustain or subvert her imagination. She has a fine sense of the complicated differences between American and British poetry, and she embodies the traditions of both in a poetry that achieves definition because of its allegiances, and distinction because of its intense and relentless individuality. She defies the riddling invitations of much twentieth-century verse by writing a poetry which begins rather than ends in song, a verse of subtle musical sensibility which still holds its own in the company of those zealous tropes, metonymy and metaphor. And she has been part of a wide circle of contemporary poetry and has developed...