Celebrating her seventieth birthday, Anne Stevenson's new collection, a Poetry Book Society Recommended title, crosses many borders. While her title poem mocks borders dividing rich nations from poor, its subtext undermines the public language of political self-justification, suggesting that the true dimensions of morality can be approached best through literature. Many of these poems balance youth and age, life and death, love and friendship, science and mythology, terrorists and victims. In one long poem she looks back to her wartime childhood in America. These are sharp-edged poems, disconcerting and musical, often bordering on laughter or tears. Anne Stevenson was born in England of American parents and grew up in the U.S. Her latest collection of poetry, Granny Scarecrow, was shortlisted for both the T.S Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award.