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`

All the Poems

Poetry by Stevie Smith

Edited by Will May

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 movie Stevie. This new and updated edition includes hundreds of works from her thirty-five-year career. In addition to the poems and illustrations from all her published volumes, the Smith scholar Will May discovered never-before-published verses and provides fascinating details about their provenance. Satirical, mischievous, teasing, disarming, Stevie Smith’s poems take readers from comedy to tragedy and back again, while her line drawings are by turns unsettling and beguiling.

Paperback(published Mar, 15 2022)

ISBN
9780811231664
Price US
29.95
Trim Size
5x8
Page Count
848

Clothbound(published Feb, 22 2016)

ISBN
9780811223805
Price US
39.95
Price CN
46
Page Count
704

Ebook(published Feb, 22 2016)

ISBN
9780811223812
Portrait of Stevie Smith

Stevie Smith

20th century English poet and novelist

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`

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

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

Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

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

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

Those crazy about this wonderful and strange poet will obviously want Will May’s splendid All the Poems

Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

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

I love her, I am crazy about her, she is innocent and smashing like a Blake only new, and a lot of pathos under the deadpan sad funny stuff, a lot of true religion.

Thomas Merton

My senses sharpen at the words of Stevie Smith.

Morrissey

I am a desperate Stevie Smith addict.

Sylvia Plath

A rare bird, a Maltese falcon. A more individual talent than Stevie Smith’s you don’t get.

Clive James, The New Yorker

She is a complete original, mixing subjects (Anglican theology, cats, suicide, sex, King Arthur), tones and vocabularies any writer of lesser confidence would have spent a lifetime trying to keep apart.

Katha Pollit, New York Times Book Review