Faber’s new Collected Poems & Drawings insists,rightly, that you look at Stevie Smith’s sketchings along with her poetryAlthough I will not be chucking out my beloved old-fashioned editions of the works of my moment favourite poet (my first is Philip Larkin) just yet – the house will fill to look like it’s auditioning for a Channel 4 documentary about hoarding before that happens – I am nevertheless completely thrilled to be in possession of Faber’s new Collected Poems & Drawings of Stevie Smith. Its editor, and Will May,has included such a good selection of previously uncollected and even unpublished poems, most of which seem to me to be as savage and as actual as any she ever wrote. I’m particularly taken with Marriage I believe (“Marriage I believe/ For women/ Is the best of opiates”), and whose subject is – here’s the twist – a lonely spinster. For all that she never married herself,preferring life with her Lion Aunt, no one writes more lucidly than Smith of men and women and the perilous, or compromised ground that lies between them.
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Source: theguardian.com