All the Poems: Stevie Smith - Hardcover

Smith, Stevie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0811223809 ISBN 13: 9780811223805

Publisher: New Directions, 2016

Synopsis

The essential edition of one of modern poetry’s most distinctive voices

Stevie Smith is among the most popular British poets of the twentieth century. Her poem “Not Waving but Drowning” has been widely anthologized, and her life was celebrated in the classic 1978 movie Stevie. This new and updated edition of Stevie Smith’s collected poems includes hundreds of works from her thirty-five-year career. The Smith scholar Will May collects poems and illustrations from published volumes, provides fascinating details about their provenance, and describes the various versions Smith presented. Satirical, mischievous, teasing, disarming, Smith’s poems take readers from comedy to tragedy and back again, while her line drawings are by turns unsettling and beguiling.

About this title

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)

Review:

“A landmark volume brimming with wit, surprises, sardonic pleasures, and abiding compassion.”
- Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

“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, The New York Review of Books

“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, The New York Times Book Review

“A rare bird, a Maltese falcon. A more individual talent than Stevie Smith’s you don’t get.”
- Clive James, The New Yorker

“That sense of the uncanny, the unheimlich or the peculiar, the grip of childhood terrors, the chance―perhaps our greatest fear―of never being known, the intimacy of wickedness, they are all here, in these poems.”
- Cynthia Zarin, The New Yorker

“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, The Rumpus

“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, The Times Literary Supplement

“Those crazy about this wonderful and strange poet will obviously want Will May's splendid All the Poems”
- Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

“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

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

About this edition

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0811223809
• ISBN 13: 9780811223805
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 848
• Editor: May Will