This New Directions Paperbook brings back into print the 1975 Oxford University Press edition of Stevie SmithsCollected Poems, her complete poetic works edited by her long-time friend James MacGibbon. On gray days when most modern poetry seems one dull colorless voice speaking through a hundred rival styles, one turns to Stevie Smith and enjoys her unique and cheerfully gruesome voice. She is a charming and original poet, commented Robert Lowell about the book that introduced Stevie to American readers, herSelected Poems(New Directions, 1964). TheSelectedwon her many enthusiasts, but it was not until the release of Hugh Whitemores filmSteviein 1981 that her poetry found a wider audience and sent that little book repeatedly back to press. The title of Miss Smiths first published collection (London, 1937) wasA Good Time Was Had By All, and indeed that is what her poetry, embroidered by her delightful, apposite doodles, provides. It brings us too into the company of wit, irony, and, as Brendan Gill remarked, images of joy and terror. ANewsweek reviewer wrote, Even in the lightest of her verse, the briefest epigram, there is a resonance, the reverberation of a triangle, if not a gong.