Designed especially for students but also for the general reader, this selection draws on the whole of Smith's output in poetry, prose, and drawings from Novel on Yellow Paper (1936) to Scorpion (1972), complemented by biographical and textual notes.

Poems with drawings spanning the artists lifetime.

The essential edition of one of modern poetry’s most distinctive voices: all Stevie Smith’s flabbergasting poems, now in paperback Stevie Smith is among the most popular British poets of the twentieth century. Her poem “Not Waving but Drowning” has been widely anthologized, and her life was celebrated in the classic movie Stevie. This new and updated edition includes hundreds of works from her thirty-five-year career. In addition to the poems and illustrations from all her published volumes, the Smith scholar Will May discovered never-before-published verses and provides fascinating details about their provenance. Satirical, mischievous, teasing, disarming, Stevie Smith’s poems take readers from comedy to tragedy and back again, while her line drawings are by turns unsettling and beguiling.

A great poet and novelist (Novel on Yellow Paper), Stevie Smith also wrote delightful short prose. And here, in A Very Pleasant Evening with Stevie Smith, is the very best of it: eight stories and four essays mixing throw-away charm and deadly sophistication. Her stories delight and surprise; her essays defend favorite subjects, such as cats and the suburbs. "Life in the suburbs is richer at the lower levels. At these levels people are not self-conscious at all, they are at liberty to be as eccentric as they please, they do not know they are eccentric".

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

Stevie Smith is best known for "Not Waving But Drowning", one of the English speaking world's favourite poems. Born in Hull as Florence Margaret Smith, her family moved to Palmers Green in 1905, and she lived there until her death on 7 March 1971. After her death, a film starring Glenda Jackson and a play were written about her life, bringing widespread revival among her readers. This biography reveals a new side of Stevie Smith's character, and demonstrates that her solitude has been overstated: she was actively involved in the social as well as intellectual life of literary London. She began writing poetry in her twenties while working as secretary. Her first book, "Novel on Yellow Paper", was published in 1936 and drew heavily on her own life, examining the unrest in England during World War I. Until the last ten years of her life, she remained virtually unknown, when she was then awarded the Cholmondeley Award for Poetry, and the Queen's Gold Medal for poetry. This work reveals how the events of Stevie Smith's life had a profound effect on her poetry, and that her life and art formed a very intimate relationship.