The impression of Stevie Smith in [Me Again: Uncollected Writings] is overwhelming, almost too much so: it is not so much a question of her putting a head round the door and trilling Whoopee here I am again, as of plumping herself down in one's lap. That is an impression she would not have wished to make. She was not only an intensely professional writer but a sort of Parnassian, whatever contrary impression the idiom of her poems may give. Her sweetest songs were those which tell of saddest thought, but tell of it by odd contraries….

The originality of her poems seems like isolation made visible. They are childish in the sense in which Henry James's children are childish, little images of dispossession which have a quality all their own. Like such children she is never on the Side of Life, but of the fatigue which for many people is the only way of making a success of it….

From the admirable introduction by Jack Barbera and William McBrien—in itself a wholly adequate substitute for any biography—we learn that Sylvia Plath much admired Stevie's poems. The letter Plath wrote … is touching in its simple wish for contact and comfort. She was hoping, in November 1962, to move with her babies to a London flat…. It was not to be, however; Sylvia Plath killed herself three months after writing the letter….

From the editors' unobtrusive annotations to Stevie's letters we learn that she herself attempted suicide at the office in 1953, a month or two after writing "Not Waving but Drowning"…. The poem has become, alas, her "Lake Isle of Innisfree", and gives no indication at all of how subtle and beautiful the sheer density of her poetry is (particularly in Harold's Leap, the preceding collection…. The critic would have to admit that in general there is a difference, and a disconcerting one, between the poems of Stevie Smith that "come off" and the ones that don't; but some none the less can come off too well, too obviously, like the one in the present volume which ends "But I forgive you Maria, / Kindly remember that." Most of the poems here, though, are aborted pieces which their author would hardly have wished to see in print….

"Beside the Seaside" is probably the best of the ten … [stories] included in this volume…. "Goodnight" [is a poem] which she wrote about a married couple, friends of hers. They used to sit late in Stevie's room, apparently reluctant to withdraw into spousality…. Though she was adept at hitting off daily dolours like this, and especially those concerning "the woe that is in marriage", the solitary fancy of her muse does not soar in such a context. Much more memorable is the cry of the wife in "Lightly Bound"….

Some of the poems will none the less have a special interest for the Stevie Smith addict, particularly a highly accomplished exercise in Miltonics, "Satan Speaks", which she wrote when hardly more than a schoolgirl….