Stevie Smith

'Cheerful, brutal, beautiful! Stevie Smith is the wildest poet of them all.' Nick Cave 'I better say straight out that I am an addict of your poetry, a desperate Smith addict.' Sylvia Plath, writing to Stevie Smith, 1962 'Revolutionary, wild, and fierce.' Ali Smith Stevie Smith was not only a famous poet in her lifetime but a poet before her...

This comprehensive and welcoming edition draws on the whole of Stevie Smith's output in poetry, prose and drawings from Novel on Yellow Paper (1936) to Scorpion and Other Poems (1972). Hermione Lee's introduction and arrangement bring out the connections between Stevie Smith's different writings, and show us what an extraordinary and original writer she was. The selection is complemented by...

When Stevie Smith died in 1971 she was one of the twentieth-century's most popular poets; many of her poems have been widely anthologised, and 'Not Waving but Drowning' remains one of the nation's favourite poems to this day. Satirical, mischievous, teasing, disarming, her characteristically lightning-fast changes in tone take readers from comedy to tragedy and back again, while her line...