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Pen Portrait - Jean Stevens
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Jean Stevens is a poet, playwright and actor. Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines, newspapers and anthologies, and broadcast on BBC Radio Three and Radio Four. She won the Leeds Libraries Writing Prize and was runner-up in a recent Bridport Poetry Competition. Jean’s plays have been performed at Derby Playhouse, the Edinburgh Festival, The Grand Theatre, Harrogate Theatre and The West Yorkshire Playhouse, and her stand-up comedy script won the Polo Prize at London’s Comedy Store. As a professional actor she has credits, for stage, film and television. |
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Her poetry collections include:
Beyond Satnav (Indigo Dreams Publishing 2016)
“Jean Stevens focuses deeply on a theme until it resonates with jewel-like clarity. She is an exciting, contemporary voice full of warmth and charm.”
Daljit Nagra
“A sure hand with form, imagery and rhythms.”
Ian McMillan
“Powerfully evocative.”
The Poetry Review
Driving in the Dark (Naked Eye Publishing 2018)
“Taut imagery, a wonderful balance between succinctness and lyricism”
Shona Jackson
“I would really recommend Jean Stevens’ Driving in the Dark. I really enjoyed reading the whole thing. I started reading it one afternoon and couldn’t put it down.
Her poems are incredibly moving.”
Kim Moore
“I really enjoyed Driving in the Dark. I found it really moving and read it all in one go. Jean’s poetry is filmic and beautiful, full of warmth and drama.”
Kay Mellor O.B.E.
“In this diverting book Jean Stevens shows that her great poetic gift is insight. She affords the reader a window on the transcendent. She finds the numinous in the ordinary.”
Steve Whitaker, The Yorkshire Review
Beyond Satnav (Indigo Dreams Publishing 2016)
“Jean Stevens focuses deeply on a theme until it resonates with jewel-like clarity. She is an exciting, contemporary voice full of warmth and charm.”
Daljit Nagra
“A sure hand with form, imagery and rhythms.”
Ian McMillan
“Powerfully evocative.”
The Poetry Review
Driving in the Dark (Naked Eye Publishing 2018)
“Taut imagery, a wonderful balance between succinctness and lyricism”
Shona Jackson
“I would really recommend Jean Stevens’ Driving in the Dark. I really enjoyed reading the whole thing. I started reading it one afternoon and couldn’t put it down.
Her poems are incredibly moving.”
Kim Moore
“I really enjoyed Driving in the Dark. I found it really moving and read it all in one go. Jean’s poetry is filmic and beautiful, full of warmth and drama.”
Kay Mellor O.B.E.
“In this diverting book Jean Stevens shows that her great poetic gift is insight. She affords the reader a window on the transcendent. She finds the numinous in the ordinary.”
Steve Whitaker, The Yorkshire Review
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The high wood
I planned to welcome you to my new garden from where we would have looked up to the calling hills, knowing that’s where we’d walk but taking time to appreciate you could. You feared the risky operation, yet were excited picturing what it might be like at last to have the breath to tramp for miles, watching your Yorkshire Terrier run wild. At the top of the steepest rise I would have shown you the high wood where birdsong makes the following silence richer, and the air fizzes with insects among chamomile and clover. We would have spread our coats where two drystone walls meet by a dip in the land. It would have been ordinary yet amazing and I would, perhaps, have said what I never said before because the time was always wrong. |