Stevie Smith – författare

INTRODUCED BY RACHEL COOKE'Virginia Woolf's roving consciousness lies behind the prose in Novel on Yellow Paper, but the tone owes more to Dorothy Parker . . . When first published in 1936, it overnight turned Smith into a celebrity . . . the subversiveness of this novel has never lost its appeal, its greatness lying in its exuberant celebration of the uncircumscribed spirit' - Frances Spalding, IndependentStevie's alter ego Pompey is young, in love and working as a secretary for the magnificent Sir Phoebus Ullwater. In between making coffee and typing letters for Sir Phoebus, Pompey scribbles down - on yellow office paper - her quirky thoughts. Her flights of imagination take in Euripedes, sex education, Nazi Germany and the Catholic Church, shattering conventions in their wake.

Stevie Smith was one of the few modern poets to reach a wide general audience. Bizarre, witty, sad, sometimes caustic, her poems impart a zest for life, and reveal her unique eye for the marvels of the ordinary and her deep sensibility to the paradoxical nature of all human emotions.

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 drawings are by turns unsettling and beguiling. In this edition of her work, Smith scholar Will May collects together the illustrations and poems from her original published volumes for the first time, recording fascinating details about their provenance, and describing the various versions Smith presented both on stage and page. Including over 500 works from Smith's 35-year career, The Collected Poems and Drawings of Stevie Smith is the essential edition of modern poetry's most distinctive voice.Nobody heard him, the dead man,But still he lay moaning:I was much further out than you thoughtAnd not waving but drowning.- 'Not Waving but Drowning'

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 biographical and textual notes, and forms an attractive introduction to the work of an idiosyncratic English genius.

'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 SmithStevie Smith was not only a famous poet in her lifetime but a poet before her time, a radical eccentric who relished the performance of poetry as sung and spoken word. The poems are distinctly unsentimental as she casts the 'eye of an anarchist' over propriety and convention, finding comedy in the tragic and tragedy in the comic. She asks the questions we don't have the nous or courage to ask, speaking for the lonely, the troubled and the trapped, and for any of us who at one time or another have found ourselves not waving but drowning.

It is 1936. Pompey Casmilus lives in London with her beloved Aunt, bothered by the menace of German militarism, bothered too by the humbug wich confronts it, bothered most of all by her hopeless love affair with Freddy, Its ending plunges Pompey into melancholy, six months rest and recuperation are prescribed and 'savage, sick and cross' Pompey goes to Schloss Tilssen on the northern German border, only to fall in with a strange band of conspirators: the plum coloured Mrs Pouncer, the absent minded Colonel Peck and the dashing Major Tom Satterthwaite, whom Pompey comes to love.