Stevie Smith was one of the few modern poets to reach a wide general audience. Bizarre, witty, sad, sometimes caustic, her poems impart a zest for life, and reveal her unique eye for the marvels of the ordinary and her deep sensibility to the paradoxical nature of all human emotions.[...]

Extraordinarily funny, with the fresh eye of a visitor from another world, Stevie Smith is a poet to savor. Wielding a throwaway wit and the strangest irony, Stevie Smith was deeply read in the classics and yet sprinkled her poetry with delightful doodles. Her poems are often very dark; her characte[...]

It is 1936. Pompey Casmilus lives in London with her beloved Aunt, bothered by the menace of German militarism, bothered too by the humbug wich confronts it, bothered most of all by her hopeless love affair with Freddy, Its ending plunges Pompey into melancholy, six months rest and recuperation are [...]