Stevie Smith always wanted her drawings to accompany her poetry, yet most were omitted from posthumous editions. As a new collection brings them together, we present four previously unpublished poems alongside her illustrations
Who or what is Stevie Smith, Ogden Nash once pondered. The poet and novelist who slinked the suburbs of north London has often proved a riddle. Her most famous poem, “Not Waving but Drowning”, turns on a fatal misunderstanding, but she is good at pulling the wool over our eyes. She once characterised writers as shrewd, and the apparently careless lollop of her lines belies an astute technician.
A constant in Smith’s career was her determination to include drawings alongside her poems, yet most were omitted from posthumous editions. When I was approached by Faber to edit a new Collected, it seemed a chance to put this right. Smith’s poetry specialises in uncanny objects – plaster busts of dead mothers sitting on pianos, hats of surreal proportions, gas fires worthy of friendship, and toxic mushrooms. Her drawings are similarly disorientating. Sketches of enigmatic women look out from the page, like readers who have got there first but are unwilling to give up their secrets to us. Like her poetry, her drawings have eclectic starting points. Some are inspired by the epigrammatic underlines of Goya or the sketches of Georg Grosz, while others skirt closer to Edward Lear. While a few appear to be illustrations to the poems they accompany, many were added to her poems at proof stage or substituted for an apparently unrelated doodle, deliberately unsettling how we might understand a poem’s speaker, tone or addressee. They are as likely to put us on our guard as provide relief.
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