A Report from the Border, by Anne Stevenson

A brave and witty rhapsodist of the fulfilled life

Although she recently won an award from the Northern Rock Foundation, Anne Stevenson remains less well-known than she deserves. The title poem of her lively new collection lists the harvest of the "Havenots": "Hunger's stare/ Drowned crops, charred hopes, fear, stupor, prayer/ And literature."

This is not a poem about poetry, but it makes a suggestive point. Original imaginations probably flourish best on borders. Yet that is no argument for neglect – a neglect to which older women poets, unlike the ever-prominent beardies in the opposite-sex team, often appear subject.

Stevenson, an American long resident in Britain, works on a broader canvas than many of her peers, inheriting a language of the intellect as well as the eye from such writers as Elizabeth Bishop. She is fine quick-sketcher; see the luminous Welsh landscape "Poems from Cwm Nantcol". Inevitably, though, whatever attracts her eye demands that she seek its teleological connection. Her knowledge of botany, ornithology and other natural sciences is impressive, but her talent is for fusing the disciplines into an honest and humane account of our world, and expressing this through rhythm and form.

Her thought is grounded by relativism. A linguistic philosopher might envy the no-nonsense exactness of one of her most quoted lines: "The way you say the world is what you get." Yet the work sometimes conveys a near-religious excitement and wonder. Unfashionably, she sings the fulfilled self, life as gift. Rhapsody washes up against factual grain; she argues against it, scrupulously, but something sticks.

In the lovely "Carol of Birds", she exhorts endangered species to "Be your own hammerbeam angels of the air/ Before in the maze of space you disappear/ Stilled by our dazzling anthrocentric mills". It is the "hammerbeam angels" we visualise. They must surely outlast the merely anthrocentric, if dazzling, mills.

The classical rhetoric of poetry originated in the art of persuasive oratory. While our spoken language inherits those old intellectual rhythms, many poets reject them, in a movement that seems to imitate the transition from analogue to digital in technology. The result is the flat-surfaced prosody currently fashionable. But it is also possible to connect them with new speech idioms and ways of seeing, as Stevenson does.

Her sonnet "To Phoebe" welds old and new cosmologies. Once, "the universe was Heaven's unspoilt estate"; now, "our plaited genes mean nothing to the spheres". The new baby's celebrant declares: "Yet no small Phoebe, circa sixteen-three,/ Was ever free to be what you shall be." This balance of human vulnerability and immense potential is more than rhetorical.

Stevenson's hard looks at mortality, including her own, remain clear-eyed, brave and witty. She is wise without portentousness, her technique faultless and her imagination fiery, political and fresh.

The reviewer's new poetry collection is 'Hex' (Bloodaxe)