Living in America by poet Anne Stevenson proved to be a charity shop treasure – Laura Waddell

My book of the week is charity shop treasure Living in America by the poet Anne Stevenson.

Anne Stevenson compared falling in love to the helpless feeling of being on a Ferris wheel (Picture: Fox Photos/Getty Images)

I’d picked it up and put it down a few times over the course of months, the price slightly too high to justify splurging. But by chance, and patience, it was suddenly reduced, and coming home with me.

This copy, a worn, red, first edition without its dust jacket (feel free, if it would please you, to imagine one for it), was published in 1965 by the University of Michigan’s imprint Generation, and okayed by the stiff and foreboding-sounding Board in Control of Student Publications.

Born in Cambridge in 1933, Stevenson moved with her family to New England in America, returning to Britain after her studies. In the 1960s, she spent time in Glasgow and was writer in residence at the University of Dundee.

I gravitate to poetry about the changing, clanging industrial cities of 20th-century America.

In the exasperated This City!, bemoaning “the ones who get drunk on it easily!/ the romantic of head, the sad-hearted,/ helpless, expensive inhabitants/ who have to believe there is no way out,/ who tear at themselves and each other…” Stevenson concludes “love love love/ is the only green in the jungle.”

The poems in this book are set on sidewalks and street fairs, populated by such figures as little girls in red coats, nuns in black veils, and “women, waiting for their husbands, sit[ting] among dahlias all the afternoons". One poem is dedicated “To an Atlanta girl killed in an air crash".

I like the clank of the Ferris wheel compared to love, “Of the end we remember exactly how/ helpless we felt, pausing in the air two/ or three times,/ falling in stages.”

I particularly relish Stevenson’s take on The Television: “Hug me, mother of noise,/ find me a hiding place./ I am afraid of my voice./ I do not like my face.”

Reading Stevenson’s biography online, I wonder whether the original owner of this near 60-year-old book might have known the poet from her time in Scotland.

It's possible. The book world, as I know from my work in publishing, is a small one. From what I have observed from a safe distance, the poetry world is smaller still.