Stevie Smith

When Stevie Smith died in 1971 she was one of the twentieth-centurys most popular poets; many of her poems have been widely anthologised, and Not Waving but Drowning remains one of the nations 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 wholly new 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 Smiths 35-year career, The Collected Poems and Drawings of Stevie Smith is the essential edition of modern poetrys most distinctive voice.I was much further out than you thought And not waving but drowning.- Not Waving but Drowning

Es el año 1949, los ecos de la guerra están empezando a silenciarse pero aún hay mucho ruido y cosas por hacer. Celia es una mujer sensible, frágil y quijotesca que trabaja en el Ministerio de la postguerra descifrando codigos. Vive en un suburbio de Londres junto a su querida Tia, pero su gran preocupacion es el amor, el amor de la amistad, con sus compañeros de trabajo, sus relaciones y sobre todo el amor que siente por su adorado primo Casmilus, con quien se va de vacaciones a visitar a su tio Heber, que es vicario. En un dialogo constante entre los personajes que hablan, discuten, cuentan historias sobre el amor y el odio con momentos de humor salvaje alternado con oleadas de melancolia y que sirven a Celia para reflexionar obsesivamente sobre el dolor inevitable del amor.Pero es tambien una novela sobre la reconstruccion, sobre las intrigas, obsesiones y disputas de un mundo destruido, donde las fiestas, los encuentros furtivos, los mensajes secretos o las conversaciones amistosas tienen segundas intenciones, un mundo de espias, aventureros y buscavidas en busca de sacar provecho de las cenizas.Utilizando la ironia como instrumento fundamental de la narracion, Stevie Smith nos adentra en la paradoja del dolor en todos los sentimientos humanos con un lenguaje poetico en el que es sin duda su libro mas impo...

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.

Cheerful, brutal, beautiful! Stevie Smith is the wildest poet of them all. Nick CaveI better say straight out that I am an addict of your poetry, a desperate Smith addict. Sylvia Plath, writing to Stevie Smith, 1962Revolutionary, 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 dont 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.

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.

Es el año 1949, los ecos de la guerra están empezando a silenciarse pero aún hay mucho ruido y cosas por hacer. Celia es una mujer sensible, frágil y quijotesca que trabaja en el Ministerio de la postguerra descifrando codigos. Vive en un suburbio de Londres junto a su querida Tia, pero su gran preocupacion es el amor, el amor de la amistad, con sus compañeros de trabajo, sus relaciones y sobre todo el amor que siente por su adorado primo Casmilus, con quien se va de vacaciones a visitar a su tio Heber, que es vicario. En un dialogo constante entre los personajes que hablan, discuten, cuentan historias sobre el amor y el odio con momentos de humor salvaje alternado con oleadas de melancolia y que sirven a Celia para reflexionar obsesivamente sobre el dolor inevitable del amor.Pero es tambien una novela sobre la reconstruccion, sobre las intrigas, obsesiones y disputas de un mundo destruido, donde las fiestas, los encuentros furtivos, los mensajes secretos o las conversaciones amistosas tienen segundas intenciones, un mundo de espias, aventureros y buscavidas en busca de sacar provecho de las cenizas.Utilizando la ironia como instrumento fundamental de la narracion, Stevie Smith nos adentra en la paradoja del dolor en todos los sentimientos humanos con un lenguaje poetico en el que es sin duda su libro mas importante, y que ha sabido captar en su extraordinaria traduccion Andres Barba.

Celia works at the Ministry in the post-war England of 1949 and lives in a London suburb. Witty, fragile, quixotic, Celia is preoccupied with love - for her friends, her colleagues, her relations, and especially for her adored cousin Casmilus, with whom she goes on holiday to visit Uncle Heber, the vicar. Here they talk endlessly, argue, eat, tell stories, love and hate - moments of wild humour alternating with waves of melancholy as Celia ponders obsessively on the inevitable pain of love. In everything she wrote, Stevie Smith captured the paradox of pain in all human affections - nowhere more so than in this wry, strongly autobiographical tale.

It is 1936. Pompey Casmilus (the heroine of Smiths debut, Novel on Yellow Paper) lives in London with her beloved Aunt, bothered by the menace of German militarism, bothered too by the humbug which confronts it, bothered most of all by her hopeless love affair with Freddy. Its ending plunges Pompey into melancholy; six months of rest and recuperation are prescribed and 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.How Pompey gets into uniform and becomes a spy is only one of the astounding events in this extraordinary novel which, on a serious level, is also about a powerful investigation of power and cruelty in a world preparing for war.

INTRODUCED BY RACHEL COOKEVirginia Woolfs 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, IndependentStevies 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.