You Know How a Cat

will bring a mouse it has

caught and lay it at your

feet so each morning I

bring you a poem that

I've written when I woke

up in the night as my tribute

to your beauty &

a promise of my love.

-James Laughlin

Across the ages, cats have provided their adopted humans with companionship, affection, mystery, and innumerable metaphors. Cats raise a mirror up to their beholders; cats endlessly captivate and hypnotise, frustrate and delight. To poets, in particular, these enigmatic creatures are the most delightful and beguiling of muses, as they purr, prowl, hunt, play, meow, and nap, often oblivious to their so-called masters. Cat Poems offers a litter of odes to our beloved felines by some of the greatest poets of all time.

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 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.

Nobody heard him, the dead man,

But still he lay moaning:

I was much further out than you thought

And not waving but drowning.

- 'Not Waving but Drowning'

This comprehensive and welcoming edition draws on the whole of Stevie Smith's output in poetry, prose and drawings from Novel on Yellow Paper (1936) to Scorpion and Other Poems (1972). Hermione Lee's introduction and arrangement bring out the connections between Stevie Smith's different writings, and show us what an extraordinary and original writer she was. The selection is complemented by biographical and textual notes, and forms an attractive introduction to the work of an idiosyncratic English genius.

Celia works at the Ministry in the post-war England of 1949 and lives in a London suburb with her beloved Aunt. Witty, fragile, quixotic, Celia is preoccupied with love -- for her friends, her colleagues, her relations, and especially for her adored cousin Casmilus, with whom she goes on holiday to visit Uncle Heber, the vicar. Here they talk endlessly, argue, eat, tell stories, love and hate -- moments of wild humour alternating with waves of melancholy as Celia ponders obsessively on the inevitable pain of love. In everything she wrote, Stevie Smith's poetic, special eye captured the paradox of pain in all human affections -- nowhere more so than in this wry, strongly autobiographical tale.

INTRODUCED BY RACHEL COOKE 'Virginia Woolf's roving consciousness lies behind the prose in Novel on Yellow Paper, but the tone owes more to Dorothy Parker . . . When first published in 1936, it overnight turned Smith into a celebrity . . . the subversiveness of this novel has never lost its appeal, its greatness lying in its exuberant celebration of the uncircumscribed spirit' - Frances Spalding, Independent Stevie's alter ego Pompey is young, in love and working as a secretary for the magnificent Sir Phoebus Ullwater. In between making coffee and typing letters for Sir Phoebus, Pompey scribbles down - on yellow office paper - her quirky thoughts. Her flights of imagination take in Euripedes, sex education, Nazi Germany and the Catholic Church, shattering conventions in their wake.

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 eye for the marvels of the ordinary and her sensibility to the paradoxical nature of all human emotions. This book contains her poems.

On a rainy, miserable morning in Paris, a twenty-something bureaucrat decides there must be more to life than dull office work. Stevie Smith tries to figure out what he could do of great significance and hit upon the notion of a trip around the world using only human power--no motors, no sails, no balloons--maybe the last great first. With no experience, no particular expedition skills, and no money, the adventure begins. A pedal-powered boat, a bike, in-line skates, and a lot of non-heroics take Stevie and his buddy, Jason, where no one has gone before. No travel writing has more accurately captured the old adage, "it's the journey that matters, not the destination." Therein lies the simple beauty of this entertaining travel tale--a search for simplicity, integrity, and freedom.