edited by Andrew Motion.

The Library of America, 205 pages, $20.

BY TOM D’EVELYN

Special to the Journal

April is “poetry month” and the plan was to highlight new poets until this volume caught my attention. It’s not that Anne Stevenson is unknown; she’s been known for many years, but for the wrong reasons.

Her biography of Sylvia Plath (1989) revealed a tough-minded critic who honored art but not at the expense of truth in a larger sense. Which should not have surprised anybody, but did; Stevenson revealed a Plath others wished to wish away.

Stevenson’s independence had long been her hallmark. Born in Cambridge, England, Stevenson spent her youth in the U.S. Her love of verse was coeval with her love of music, which filled each house she lived in. At the instigation of Donald Hall in the ’60s she began writing to and about Elizabeth Bishop; she recently published a second book on Bishop.

One year after moving to England, her first book of poems was published — “Living in America” (1965). Her break-out book came almost a decade later: “Correspondences” (1974), a long epistolary poem, is an almost Jamesian look at an American family; and one may read it in this very selective Selected.

Today in England, Stevenson is recognized as a “master poet” — however unPC, the term is correct. On opening this volume, one immediately feels resistance: this poetry is not taking itself seriously enough; it plays with hallowed ideas; even the poet’s self is contested — “Who’s Joking with the Photographer?” opens “Not my final face, a map of how to get there.” “We” appears at least as often as “I.” We read: “When we belong to the world / we become what we are” (“Poem for a Daughter”).

This little white book is as refreshing as a perfect traveling companion. One of my favorite poems is “Beach Kites.” It begins, “Is this a new way of being born? / To feel some huge crescent personality / burgeoning out of your shoulders, / winging you over the sand, the sluggish sea? / Mile upon mile of contaminated Wash is / tucking a cold March sky into the horizon.”

Stevenson’s voice is both intimate and universal. Her diction is complex, worldly, specific, rippling and pulling things on. Her special music is both muscular and fleet; the rhythmic units crystal clear and ever changing. She is the Chopin of poets. ANNE STEVENSON: SELECTED POEMS,

tdevelyn@earthlink.net