Stevie Smith: you’ve read the poems, now look at the pictures

Although I will not be chucking out my beloved old editions of the works of my second favourite poet (my first is Philip Larkin) just yet – the house will have to look like it’s auditioning for a Channel 4 documentary about hoarding before that happens – I am nevertheless completely thrilled to be in possession of Faber’s new Collected Poems & Drawings of Stevie Smith. Its editor, Will May, has included such a good selection of previously uncollected and even unpublished poems, most of which seem to me to be as savage and as true as any she ever wrote. I’m especially taken with Marriage I Think (“Marriage I Think/ For women/ Is the best of opiates”), whose subject is – here’s the twist – a lonely spinster. For all that she never married herself, preferring life with her Lion Aunt, no one writes more lucidly than Smith of men and women and the perilous, compromised ground that lies between them.