The uncollected work assembled for "Me Again" is not a case of spinning a deceased artist's old notes to the milkman into timely gold. This collection, though imperfect, holds treasures….

Stevie—nee Florence Margaret—Smith constantly "blurred distinctions between one form of writing and another." She quoted her poems in her stories and essays, transplanted ideas (sometimes word for word across years) from her essays to her book reviews and drew heavily from her own life in almost everything she wrote.

The stories in "Me Again"—and these are all of Stevie Smith's stories—are an uneven lot. The opener, "Beside the Sea," has shining moments but fails in its stilted speech and obvious setups for the Stevie character, a writer named Helen, to talk her beliefs and recite her poems at a friend. "In the Beginning of the War" … is an artful piece of eavesdropping that deliciously re-creates dialogue among some liberals of the period. And it's hard to imagine a writer among us today unable to identify with Stevie/Helen's angst in "Story of a Story." Having written a thinly veiled piece based on friends ("Sunday at Home"), she not only lost the friends, she was threatened with a libel accusation….

The essays show her stunning intelligence, wit, perversity. She is sensitive, scrupulous, wise. Also smug as all get-out. She'll hang on to an idea with the grip and growl of a dog at tug-of-war, as in "Some Impediments to Christian Commitment." Here, and elsewhere, particularly in the poems, we see that she is almost as obsessed with Christ, with what she can and cannot accept about Christianity, as she is with death….

Her book reviews … made up my favorite section. A reviewer for 30 years, she is emphatic, direct; enviably concise, graceful, personable. How can we not love the Stevie who wrote of Simone Weil: "It is perhaps the humility of laziness she lacks?"…

With the exception of "On the Dressing gown lent me by my Hostess the Brazilian consul in Milan, 1958," most of [the poems] do not match the style or content of her more familiar "Away, Melancholy" or "Not Waving But Drowning." Those will be found tucked inside essays here, though there's no index to tell you that….

In the last of [the letters collected here], Stevie wrote to a friend about the symptoms of an illness. But did she ever learn that they were caused by the brain tumor that was to kill her? Did she ever know she was dying? And if she did, had anyone heard what this woman, who so relentlessly welcomed Death with her pen, had to say once she actually found its hand on her shoulder? "Me Again" does not answer or even ask these questions.

"All the writer can do …" Stevie wrote in 1956, "is offer his life, which seems to him so shadowy and inconsiderable, to some god or other … to chew upon and make the best of." "Me Again" lets Stevie Smith continue her offer.