All The Poems – Stevie Smith - Hardcover

Smith, Stevie; May, Will

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0811223809 ISBN 13: 9780811223805

Publisher: New Directions, 2017

Synopsis

Stevie Smith (1902-1971) is without a doubt one of the most popular British poets of the twentieth century. Her poem Not Waving but Drowning is widely anthologized, and her life was fleshed out in the classic 1978 movie Stevie. Satirical, mischievous, teasing, disarming, her poems take readers from comedy to tragedy and back again, while her line drawings are by turns unsettling and beguiling. In this new and updated edition of her work, Stevie Smith scholar Will May collects Smith s poems and illustrations from her published volumes and provides fascinating details about their provenance, describing the various versions Smith presented on both stage and page. Collected Poems includes over five hundred works from her thirty-five year career."

About this title

Review:

I am a desperate Stevie Smith addict.--Sylvia Plath

My senses sharpen at the words of Stevie Smith.--Morrissey

A landmark volume brimming with wit, surprises, sardonic pleasures, and abiding compassion.--Donna Seaman

A poet who deserves a place, among her follow modernists, as one of the best, silly-serious, funny-sad, mock mock-heroic poets of our time.--Angela Leighton

She is a great poet because almost half a century after her death, her poems are more startling and bizarre than those of many poets who deliberately set out, as one suspects Smith never did, to be startling and bizarre.--David Orr

Now, forty-five years after her death, bound inside this large annotated collection, [Smith] can be celebrated as a major English poet of the twentieth century. She is a writer of astonishing skill, range, comedy, and depth of feeling; she is inimitable, strange, and utterly original.--Hermione Lee

A rare bird, a Maltese falcon. A more individual talent than Stevie Smith's you don't get.--Clive James

Smith's great gift is to sit on our shoulder like a feisty bird that's traveled a long distance, has been half starved on the way, and hopes your map will be a different from hers.--Barbara Berman

There is variety and inventiveness, much humor and understanding and a constant poignancy. Her gift was to create a peculiar emotional weather between the words, a sense of pity for what is infringed and unfulfilled. Death, waste, loneliness, cruelty, the maimed, the stupid, the innocent, the trusting--her concerns were central ones, her compassion genuine and her vision almost tragic.--Seamus Heaney

About the Author:

Stevie Smith (1902-1971) was the author of three novels and nine poetry volumes and lived almost her whole life in northern London. She was officially recognized with the Cholmondeley Award for Poetry in 1966 and the Queen's Gold Medal for poetry in 1969.

Will May is author of Stevie Smith and Authorship (Oxford University Press, 2010)

About this edition

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0811223809
• ISBN 13: 9780811223805
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 704