Holding Our Own: The Selected Poems of Ann Stanford by Ann Stanford Edited by Maxine Scates and David Trinidad Copper Canyon 224 pp. Available from Small Press Distribution

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Stanford clearly was associated with the academy and with the poetry "establishment". She was a noted scholar; a translator of classical poetry; a university teacher (Scates and Trinidad in their introductions to this collection write lovingly and movingly of her influence as a teacher); a recipient of grants from such government agencies as The National Endowments for the Humanities and the Arts. She served as an officer of The Poetry Society of America and chaired the Pulitzer Prize Committee for Poetry in 1984. Her writing mentor as an undergraduate was Yvor Winters, a formidable literary critic and the epitome of the academic poet. And was it the Fates or the Muses who gave her the name of a major American university (which she attended)?

More importantly, her poetry shares characteristics with those academic poets that Allen's anthology meant to call into question: many of the poems in Holding Our Own, such as "The Protéstant", "The Sky Rocket", and perhaps especially "The Committee" (apparently about an academic committee), are reminiscent in their wit and cleverness, though not in their poetic forms, of the poetry of Richard Wilbur. Her poems make subtle allusions to Christian iconography and often employ Christian diction and theology. They allude frequently to classical subjects and figures such as (among many others) Venus, metamorphosis, Adonis, The Four Horsemen, Pandora, Tiberius, Pan and, in a section of linked poems, "The Women of Perseus": Danae, The Graeae, Medusa, Andromeda, Perseus. So too, the poems are written in traditional looking forms: the early poems rhyme loosely, and most are written in stanzas. Finally, Stanford's poetic voice is not prophetic or "visionary" in anything like, say, the Pound, McClure, or Ginsberg manners, not anti-establishment or -tradition like, say, Gary Snyder or Diane di Prima.

But not so fast. Cooked and raw are useful in defining broad characteristics but allow for little discrimination: cooking is various and not without usefulness. Take away the conventional forms and we see that Robert Frost has quite a lot in common with William Carlos Williams. Conversely, certain rawness can be quite refined: sushi, for example, or the poetry of Denise Levertov. Likewise, many -- maybe most -- so-called Raw poets allude to classical figures and religious motifs, and "open" forms must develop their own logic and patterns. A closer examination of Stanford's poetry, made possible by this collection, reveals the limitations of an easy categorization of her as an "academic", as a "cooked" poet.

Her poetry is rooted in living in the world, not sent down from an academic tower. Few of her poems are "about" academic or classical subjects, even those with classical allusions in their titles. Even when entering a mystical or metaphysical realm, as in "Above the Earth", she asks, "...Who can hold/Such high hosanna through the sounding days?/But fall again to voice" and "Cry out the luster of that glimpsed garden." The collection's opening poem, "The Blackberry Thicket", tells us what that falling most essentially is about. The speaker "stands here in a ditch" picking wild blackberries; acts (picks berries, remembers, walks); watches; tastes ("the blue of mulberry on the tongue"); feels (her "arm scratched in thickets of spiders"); and listens. This attention with all her senses to the "earnest part" of the thicket results in the speaker's being stained, smudged, "printed with the earth/Always and always the earth ground into the fingers." It also leads her to feel within what she experiences as a "presence" and to realize that she is "surely not alone." The "here" and now -- "caught between never and now" -- are the real subjects of her work.

This collection of Stanford's poems is important for several reasons. First, except for a collection of her final poems, published posthumously as Dreaming the Garden by Cahuenga Press (2000), Stanford's books are no longer in print. Scates and Trinidad have made them available again, providing both an occasion and an opportunity for a reassessment of Stanford.

Second, the chronological arrangement of the poems allows us to see Stanford's development as a poet. Many of the earlier poems selected from The Weathercock employ rhyme and other traditional conventions, while later poems rarely rhyme and break away from certain stanzaic and punctuation conventions. Similarly, many of the earlier poems are grounded in memories, while later poems are visionary and mythic. Her later poems, too, in "The Sword", "The Weaver", "The Bell", "365 Poems" and "Dreaming the Garden", for example, focus in metaphoric and mythic ways on poetry and the poet, on making and craft. Most important, however, is the development of poetic voice. Note the diction and syntax in these rhetorical and exhortative lines from "The Sky Rocket", an early poem:

Gathering suspense in the attempt to thrust
Beyond the earth! Then, sudden gasp and stop.
Elate, I puffed in fire and golden drops
Till the one brightness spread to nebulous.

Long and deep and hollow within me
where the sound comes to birth
where the shudder first catches
the bronze at my side, vibrates and travels
round and round my surface like the thongs
of a sling whirled in air till it borrows
flight from its circling, and the sound flies out...

And the plump palomino, stomping to be off
belongs to the man in the pale overcoat
who remains stock still, as if content where they are.

Finally, the book's order is significant. Scates and Trinidad have taken the never-published manuscript of selected poems that Stanford had prepared before her death, and added to it poems they have chosen (including those from the posthumous Dreaming the Garden). Thus, the selection is close to what the poet herself wanted, but with some differences stemming from careful and respectful editing. According to Trinidad, the editors "chose not to include any of Ann's early poems -- her mature voice clearly begins with the first poem in The Weathercock, 'The Blackberry Thicket'". This poem, which opens the collection, serves as a sort of "directory" to the themes, motifs and concerns of much of the volume: the names of things; the elusiveness of spirit; the ambiguity of life with its abundance and loss; the tenuous, fragile and always imperiled balance of things in the here and now. The editors have placed many poems next to each other to emphasize repeated subjects, imagery, or themes, varying concepts and motifs, so the poems can be read not just singly, but also as related, linked groups of poems. I agree with Trinidad, too, when he writes that in the poems of Dreaming..., "[Stanford] is no longer a poet writing about a garden, she is the garden...she is a participant in her own myths...." Scates and Trinidad have included in the book most of Stanford's poems that are about gardens or use garden imagery so we can watch this process evolve through the book. The result of these various editorial decisions is a book of poems that seem not merely to have been chronologically "selected" but thoughtfully arranged.

In the title poem of the first volume selected here, "The Weathercock", the weathercock claims that because he points in the wind's direction, he "crow[s] though none may hear/In the vast spinning world I still point true". Stanford's poems, too, "point true", but in a more authentic way. Throughout a time of great change in American poetry, she resisted pointing whichever way the wind blew; rather, she developed a distinctive, persistent, and subtle voice of her own. Stanford's poems and this much needed selection demonstrate that "Cooked vs. Raw" is an unnecessarily crude distinction. We need a new measure for her poems: let's say aged, as a fine wine.

-- Dr. Ronald Tranquilla is a professor of English at St. Vincent College, in Latrobe, Pennsylvania.

The past quarter century has witnessed the greatest blossoming of American poetry in history, along with the first translations of some of the world's classic literature. During this time, Copper Canyon Press has remained dedicated to publishing poetry in a wide range of styles, and from the full range of the world's many cultures. As the premier publisher in the United States devoted exclusively to poetry, Copper Canyon has been honored to publish so many talented poets from multifarious backgrounds and cultures, including Pablo Neruda, Thomas McGrath, Lucille Clifton, Carolyn Kizer, W.S. Merwin, Su Tung-p'o, Hayden Carruth, Denise Levertov, Kenneth Rexroth, Olga Broumas, David Lee and many others.