Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Smith, Stevie (Vol. 25) - Stephen Tapscott

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STEPHEN TAPSCOTT

From the first poems in [her Collected Poems], Smith's jingling eccentric rhythms and faux naifs social observations seem as finished and as edgy as the later, more familiar poems. The pieces are blunt, whimsical with an acidic toughness that belies their nursery-rhymed, chatty forms. Consciously resembling Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, Smith's poems purport to be innocent, or at least unaware of the final reaches of their suggestiveness. (Like Blake, too, she illustrates her own poems—with wobblingly childish line-drawings.) But the tightness of her forms avoids external emotionalizing or sentiment: the prancing rhythms and the obsessive, even nonsensical rhymes make the childishness of the form more penetrating, more subtly half-familiar, than a booming rhetoric or a free-verse profundity would do. And like Theodore Roethke, for instance, who in his "Lost Son" poems returns to nursery rhymes and to clinking...

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1. Introduction
2. Calvin Bedient
3. Stephen Tapscott
4. Mark Storey
5. Michael Schmidt
6. John Bayley
7. Victoria Glendinning
8. Penelope Fitzgerald
9. Carole Angier
10. Lisa Mitchell
11. Quentin Crisp
12. Joyce Carol Oates
13. Copyright

1. Joyce Carol Oates