STEVENS, Peter

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Nationality: Canadian. Born: Manchester, Lancashire, England, 17 November 1927. Education: Burnage High School, Manchester, graduated 1946; Nottingham University, B.A. (honors) in English, Cert.Ed. 1951; McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, 1963–64,M.A. 1963; University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Ph.D. 1968. Family: Married June Sidebotham in 1957; two daughters and one son. Career: Schoolteacher in England, 1951–57; chair of the department of English, Hillfield College, Hamilton, Ontario, 1957–64; lecturer, Extension Division, McMaster University, 1961–64; assistant professor of English, University of Saskatchewan, 1964–69. Associate professor, 1969–73, professor of English, 1973–97, and since 1997 professor emeritus, University of Windsor, Ontario. Poetry editor, Canadian Forum, Toronto, 1968–73; director and editor, Sesame Press, Windsor, 1974–81; jazz columnist, Windsor Star, 1973–90; poetry editor, Literary Review of Canada, 1993–98. Awards: Canada Council award, 1969. Address: 2055 Richmond Street, Windsor, Ontario, N8Y 1L3, Canada.

Publications

Poetry

Plain Geometry. Toronto, Ganglia Press, 1968.

Nothing But Spoons. Montreal, Delta Canada, 1969.

A Few Myths. Vancouver, Talonbooks, 1971.

Breadcrusts and Glass. Fredericton, New Brunswick, Fiddlehead, 1972.

Family Feelings and Other Poems. Guelph, Ontario, Alive Press, 1974.

Momentary Stay. London, Ontario, Killaly Press, 1974.

And the Dying Sky Like Blood: A Bethune Collage for Several Voices. Ottawa, Borealis Press, 1974.

The Bogman Pavese Tactics. Fredericton, New Brunswick, Fiddlehead, 1977.

And All That Jazz. Toronto, League of Canadian Poets, 1980.

Coming Back. Windsor, Ontario, Sesame Press, 1981.

Revenge of the Mistresses. Windsor, Ontario, Black Moss Press, 1981.

Out of the Willow Trees. Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Thistledown Press, 1986.

Swimming in the Afternoon: Selected Poems of Peter Stevens. Windsor, Ontario, Black Moss Press, 1992.

Rip Rap: Yorkshire Ripper Poems. Windsor, Ontario, Black Moss Press, 1995.

Thinking into the Dark. Calgary, Alberta, Bayeux Arts Press, 1997.

Attending to This World. Windsor, Ontario, Black Moss Press, 1998.

Other

Modern English-Canadian Poetry: A Guide to Information Sources Detroit, Gale, 1978.

Miriam Waddington and Her Work. Toronto, ECW Press, 1984.

Dorothy Livesay: Patterns in a Poetic Life. Toronto, ECW Press, 1992.

Editor, The McGill Movement: A.J.M Smith, F.R. Scott, and Leo Kennedy. Toronto, Ryerson Press, 1969.

Editor, with J.L. Granatstein, Forum: Canadian Life and Letters 1920–1970: Selections from "The Canadian Forum." Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1972.

Editor, The First Day of Spring: Stories and Other Prose, by Raymond Knister. Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1976.

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Manuscript Collections: University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon; McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario.

Critical Studies: By Robert Thacker, in Biography, 17(1), winter 1994; in Canadian Literature, 144, 1995.

Peter Stevens comments:

I deal with the local landscape and places: the prairie, its place in my own personal and family life, its past, its geologic history, its mythology. I write usually in free verse paragraphs and have experimented with some concrete forms, a method of using anagrams I call Anagrammatics. General influences are simply Canada and being Canadian. Canadian writers I admire and whose work has probably made an impression on mine are Al Purdy and Earle Birney. I admire the technical facility of Auden and early Ezra Pound. I have paid attention to the North Americanness of W.C. Williams, particularly as it emerges in a Canadian manner in the poetry of W.W.E. Ross and Raymond Souster. More recently I have responded in my work to four American poets: Henry Taylor, Jack Gilbert, Stephen Dunn, and Stephen Dobyns.

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Peter Stevens is a poet who at once reflects the immigrant tradition and the strong regionalism of Canadian poetry. Emigrating from Britain to Canada, he brought with him a poetic sensibility influenced by the low-toned English writing of the 1950s. That sensibility has since been modified by Canadian experience, not only of daily life but also of the literary ambience. The result is a manner that is undramatic, deliberately uncolorful but, rather like an early spring landscape on the prairies where Stevens spent much of his time in Canada, slowly revealing of subtleties of perception and tone, pleasing gradations in the range of gray and brown.

Stevens finally settled in Windsor, Ontario, and became the center of a small poetic group there, and for a time he enjoyed a certain national standing as poetry editor of Canadian Forum. It is with southern Ontario poets that his affinities seem to lie.

Significantly, Stevens himself recognizes the influence on him of Canadian imagists like W.W.E. Ross and Raymond Souster. As with these poets, there is little metaphorical or adjectival color in Stevens's poems. The images are meant to speak dryly for themselves, as in the opening lines of "Fuschia":

	blood drops belled
	  hanging in hedges
	  above the bay curved
     under cliffs I remember
	  an island in my past ….

Indeed, there are times when Stevens is very explicit about the role of the poet as observer rather than commentator. This is evident, for example, in the poem "Seeing Is Seeing Is Believing," from his early collection Breadcrusts and Glass:

A stalker lurches across the snow.
His shadow stretches inhuman long
across snow's glistening crust of ice.
 
A rabbit sits stark still, then spurts away
to black trees, dark lines blacker on the white,
as this dense shadow slides into his eye.
 
All I see is rabbit flashing into shadows
away from stealthy shadow: no comment.
The eye does not speak, it does not think …

While many poems seem to show Stevens's thoughtful perception of the natural world and little more, others have more depth. An example of the latter is And the Dying Sky like Blood, a suite based on the life and death of Norman Bethune, a Canadian hero in China. Here a social conscience and a political indignation are extended. There are other poems that show Stevens to be sharply aware of the anomalies and frustrations of the artistic life (a whole suite was written on painters), and in these there emerge an ironic, almost acerbic view of the self and, at times, a curious, questioning consciousness of literature as pretension. There is a strain of poetic populism in much of his work that leads Stevens at times to incorporate jazz themes and vulgar erotic elements into his poems.

—George Woodcock