Jean Stevens

Driving in the Dark 2018 Jean Stevens

The poems in Jean Stevens' latest collection range through everything from a pub on the North York Moors on a black cloaked night, an encounter with a stranger in the dead hours in Soho and jackdaws who come mob-handed, to a reflection on Elisabeth Frink's 'The Walking Madonna', an accident on black ice, a muddy quad bike, and a meeting with Beethoven in Burnley.

Among poems inspired by her Yorkshire Dales home (I've fallen in love with the bones of this place ... where wind meets wind) are accounts of late love - when you've lost your hair, your waistline, your hearing, and your sweating stains the bed, and of quietly desolate loss: I thought I saw and heard you... This is a body of work with a beating heart.