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Waterstones in Hull are extremely supportive of Hull
& East Riding writers, and carry a stock of many of the books mentioned on this site.
Stevie Smith
Stevie "Not waving but drowning" Smith was
born in Hull in 1902, although she was removed to London at the age of three when her father ran off to sea. She died in 1971.
Like Philip Larkin, she tried her hand and novels, but is best known for her poetry. Currently going through a rather quiet period, she is bound to bounce back given the sharpness and clarity of her work.
"The Collected Poems"
"This book (which also contains her own illustrations) proves that Stevie was not just a comic poet (although her poems are funny), but one with an immense amount of knowledge about human feelings -- especially about feelings of neglect, or missed oppertunities."
"A Selection"
In her way Stevie Smith is as purely English as Dorothy Parker is pure New Yorker, and her most successful work is based on an English distrust of the emotions.
"Novel on Yellow Paper"
"I first read this book when I was about eighteen and I must have read it at least 6 times over the last 20 years. Every time I read it I find something new that I missed before: some reference I didn't understand when I was younger. Sometimes I just dip into a chapter or two, especially when I'm feeling sad. It really is one of those books that can make you laugh and cry. It's a book for adults about friendship, depression, love, laughter and everything that goes into making us mature and kind people. The greatest praise I can give this book is that when I come to the end, I usually find myself starting at page one again."
"Over the Frontier"
Smith herself dismissed her second novel as a failed experiment, but its attempt to parody popular genre fiction in order to explore profound political issues now seems to predate post-modern fiction. If anti-Semitism was one of the key themes of Novel on Yellow Paper, Over the Frontier is concerned with militarism. In particular, she asks how the necessity of fighting Fascism can be achieved without descending into the nationalism and dehumanisation that fascism represents.
"The Holiday"
Smith's final novel is her own favourite, and most fully realised. It is concerned with personal and political malaise in the immediate post-war period. Most of the characters are either employed in the army or civil service in post-war reconstruction, and its heroine, Celia, works for the Ministry as a crytographer and propagandist. |
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