Since Ann Stanford's death in 1987, her books have vanished from print and her name off the tongue of the current list of important American poets. This book, Stanford's last collection, had finally been published after over a decade's wait. It's a good one--another strong group of poems that meditate on geography, life, and art. Stanford's work has been likened to Elizabeth Bishop's--and for good reason! Stanford is a rare poet who understands the complex relationship between language and aesthetics.

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.