, published by Oxford University Press in 1993 as part of the Oxford Poets Series, is Anne Stevenson’s twelfth collection of published poetry. It brings together thirty-six poems, written since the publication of
The Other House, previously published separately in a range of periodicals and anthologies. The volume is dedicated to Mary Lucas, her husband Peter’s mother, and built around eight poems, collectively entitled “Visits to the Cemetery of the Long Alive”, dealing with the pain, sadness and anger of old age and approaching death, particularly as the poet had witnessed it in visiting Mrs Lucas in a nursing home for the elderly.
Many of the poems in Four and a Half Dancing Men were written when Stevenson was living part of each year in her
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Citation: Gordon, Ian. "Four and a Half Dancing Men". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 15 August 2011 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=31611, accessed 24 November 2024.]
