Not Waving but Drowning and other poems

Stevie Smith was a famous poet in her lifetime, but also a poet before her time, a master of the spoken and incantatory word, who relished her outsider status and the thrill of an appreciative audience. In poems that are distinctly unsentimental, she casts an anarchist eye 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 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]'Revolutionary, wild, and fierce.' Ali Smith