Poet Anne Stevenson was thinking about retirement until she won Britain's biggest literary prize. She talks to Women's Editor Christen pears about her life and her poetry

SOME claim poetry is outdated, even obsolete, but for Anne Stevenson, it is more relevant than ever. As a poet, she considers herself a guardian of the English language.

"Spin is everywhere these days but I have no time for it," she says. "We should be much more careful about the way we use language and not exploit it. Poetry is, to me, a keeper and an explorer of language. It's incredibly important."

Born in America, she has lived in England, on and off, since the 1950s but retains a strong transatlantic accent, as well as a warm and easy manner that seems distinctly un-English.

Anne first came to the North-East in 1980 when she was appointed Writer in Residence for Northern Arts and, after a spell in Cambridge, moved back into the region, into an imposing town house on Durham's Western Hill, in 1998 with her husband, Peter.

"I think we're settled for life. We have friends here and the writing community in the area is very healthy. It's a very encouraging place to live for writers."

At the age of 69, she had been considering retirement but last week, she won £60,000 in The Northern Rock Foundation Writer Award - Britain's newest and biggest literary award.

"I was thinking about not pushing my writing any more but this has given me a shot in the arm. You need a great spurt of energy and concentration when you're writing so I'm going to get my strength together and push on and hopefully get a book of poems finished by the end of the summer."

She works in a room that takes up the entire top floor of the house, a warm, light space under the eaves, separated from the rest of the house by a narrow, curving staircase.

For her, its inaccessibility is an integral part of the creative process. She starts writing early in the day, immediately after she has woken up, and in the attic, there are no distractions. "If I do it that way, straight from sleep, I can tap into the unconscious. I often wake up with my best ideas," she explains.

She describes her own work as "philosophical or at least meditative".

"When you write poetry, you try to pick up on the smallest detail in life that strikes you as important. I don't think my poetry particularly expresses me. It starts with me but it moves onto something that expresses the general.

"Poetry has a reputation for being obscure and difficult but, these days, it isn't really, other than in some of the highbrow publications. On the whole, I think it is very easy to understand. You have to think about it, of course, because it's a very concentrated, very condensed form of writing. But if you read it line by line and not just for the meaning, you can gain a lot from it."

Brought up on the works of Keats, Tennyson and Wordsworth, she has written poetry since the age of 12 or 13. "I loved all those romantic poets. I learned the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner by heart and I actually think that's the best way to learn about poetry. If you learn to recite, then you learn to write in rhythm."

Rhythm is second nature to Anne. Her front room is dominated by the grand piano, which she still plays although she is now deaf. She studied music at university in Michigan, where her father taught philosophy, but changed courses after a year because she didn't find it challenging enough.

"I studied French, Italian and history instead but never literature. I didn't want the professors to spoil the books I loved," she explains with a grin.

After university, she came to England to marry and to experience the way of life and culture she loved - it was the country of Shakespeare, Dickens, Jane Austen and Wordsworth.

She was followed a year later by another young American poet, Sylvia Plath. She and Plath were exact contemporaries, although Plath had "taken a year out to have a nervous breakdown" before coming to England. They never met but her fellow poet has become an important figure in Anne's life; several years ago, she published Bitter Fame, her acclaimed biography of Plath.

"I wrote that biography to come to an understanding of myself as much as of her. She and I had such parallel experiences, although they were also very different. It's hard to think she would have been my age now. She seems to belong so much to the past."

When Plath committed suicide at the age of 31, she became a legend, but with no tragedy or lurid private life to propel her into the spotlight, Anne has remained relatively unknown outside the world of poetry and it doesn't bother her in the least.

"No one would become a poet if they wanted fame and fortune. There's much more chance of those things if you write prose. I write poetry because I enjoy it. I feel comfortable with it and I can't really imagine doing anything else."

This is one of the poems Anne submitted for the prize, dedicated to her late friend and neighbour, Nerys Johnson, who painted the picture which appears on the cover of the Granny Scarecrow anthology.

Portrait of the Artist in an Orthopaedic Halo Crowned with Flowers

She lives next door to dying

in a shack of bones,

her gorgeous spirit furnishing

that worst of homes.

A votive flame, she celebrates

the air she burns.

A flowering halo subjugates

her crown of thorns.

Her eyes - amontillado

in the brimming glass -

look straight into the Angel's.

Then she lets him pass