Stevie Smith

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Not Waving but Drowning and other poems

'Cheerful, brutal, beautiful! Stevie Smith is the wildest poet of them all.' Nick Cave

Stevie 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 spoken word (before that was a thing). 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 imagined ourselves not waving but drowning.

'Variety and inventiveness, much humour and understanding, and a constant poignancy. . . Death, waste, loneliness, cruelty, the maimed, the stupid, the trusting - her concerns were central ones, her compassion genuine.' Seamus Heaney

'Her poems speak with the authority of sadness.' Philip Larkin

'I better say straight out that I am an addict of your poetry, a desperate Smith addict.'

Sylvia Plath, Letter to Stevie Smith, 19 November 1963

'Revolutionary, wild, and fierce.' Ali Smith