Smith Stivie. Collected poems

New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. — 600 p. — ISBN: 0-19-519816-6“On gray days when most modern poetry seems one dull colorless voice speaking through a hundred rival styles, one turns to Stevie Smith and enjoys her unique and cheerfully gruesome voice. She is a charming and original poet.” — wrote Robert Lowell about Stevie Smith.Beloved by British old and young, Stevie Smith’s poetry is now finding a wider audience in the United States. In their brevity and rhythms, the poems resemble the work of Ogden Nash. But Smith turns her wit toward themes of death and the macabre, revealing what one reviewer called "an ear for the silent scream." Those familiar with Stevie Smith’s work as well as those new to it will welcome this first complete collection, which brings together nearly five hundred poems, accompanied by some four hundred of her idiosyncratic drawings. As John Bayley wrote in The Listener (London), ‘‘The instant appeal which Stevie Smith’s poems have always had shows how good they are — such immediacy is the acid test — but has also tended to obscure the kinds of density they undoubtedly possess...Everything she wrote gives the gloriously stimulating and unnerving impression that she could nail any posture any time. We can be grateful for this admirably produced and edited compilation of poems.”