Stevie Smith, Selected Poems (book review)

Stevie Smith, Selected Poems

It’s easy to see how Sylvia Plath became a “desperate Smith addict”: her poems skip to the beat of light-verse, propelled along by slightly off-beat rhythms and traditional rhyming patterns - but with dark hearts.

This makes her poems instantly likeable, whilst also, deeply affective [I Am; The Forlorn Sea]. Some are a bit absurd, or take sinister twists and awkward turns – they jar [Mrs Simpkins; The River God; Thoughts about the Person from Porlock].

Many of them are direct, speak frankly about ugly things, shadowy feelings; death-things [Death Came to Me; I Hate This Girl]; whilst others are much quieter, strike a more elegiac note [Come On, Come Back; I Rode with My Darling; Out of Time]. And they have edge; a social and political conscience that pipes up, bites down [Deathbed of a Financier; The English; The Leader].

In his preface to her Selected Poems, James MacGibbon described Smith as a sociable personality, a woman with "multitudes of friends" who could "converse unflaggingly".

And yet, a lot of her poems bear the pulse of the outsider’s heartbeat [Deeply Morbid; Every Lovely Limb’s A Desolation; Look!; The Hostage]. They speak of the essential solitude the individual heartmindsoul resides in; tell of how behind the eyes, each of us is, inherently, inevitably, alone.

But despite this, there are also Smith poems that throb with hope, compassion, a lust for life [Away, Melancholy; In the Park; Do Not!].

I have a soft spot for artists who vacillate between, negotiate, these sorts of quintessential life tensions, who say: don’t be afraid to smash up against the black rocks – but then pull yourself back out to sea, look up, embrace the moonshine. 

Stevie Smith was one of those artists.

~

The Actress

by Stevie Smith

I can’t say I enjoyed it, but the pay was good.

Oh how I weep and toil in this world of wood!

Longing in the city for the pursuit of beautiful scenery,

I earn my bread upon the stage, amid painted greenery.

I have a poet’s mind, but a poor exterior,

What goes on inside me is superior.

By Michelle Wright

(Summer 2012)