Stevie: The Movie

Hirsch, Edward

1. Prologue: "Is she woman? Is she myth?"

All poets are misfits and oddballs, but there is something especially discomfiting and even improbable about the English poet Stevie Smith. "Who and what is Stevie Smith?" Ogden Nash asked in a Dorothy Parkeresque moment: "Is she woman? Is she myth?" Wearing a childlike pinafore and white lace stockings, telling a puzzled reporter, "I'm probably a couple of sherries below par most of the time," chanting or singing her poems in a high, off pitch voice at poetry gatherings in the 1960s ("She chanted her poems artfully off key, in a beautifully flawed plainsong that suggested two kinds of auditory experience," Seamus Heaney once said: "an embarrassed party-piece by a child halfway between giggles and tears, and a deliberate faux-naif rendition by a virtuoso"), she seems so unlikely and, in retrospect, necessary: a welcome tonic, a heartbreaking brightness we needed all along. We still need this figure who arrived like a Blakean thunderclap with all the freshness, frivolity, and forthrightness of childhood, with all the sad and caustic insights of long experience. Thinking about her elemental poems, which are so cheeky and rash, so stingingly honest, impertinent, and deathward-leaning, so filled with mordant wit and comic desperation ("Iearn too that being comical," she explains in a poem about Jesus, "does not ameliorate the desperation"), I keep wanting to adapt something Randall Jarrell once wrote about Walt Whitman. Someone might have put on her tombstone STEVIE SMITH: SHE HAD HER NERVE.

Poets haven't generally fared very well in the movies. Poetry is a minority art, and writing it is a strangely avid, interior, and intimate process difficult to penetrate and describe from the outside. Whether in perplexed desperation or simple bad faith (let's call it desperation for the sake of the medium), directors and actors have often latched onto external mannerisms and affectations-the black beret, the wide cravat and crooked walking stick, the flung scarf-to display a poet's character. How many times I have suffered over the years watching mock poets-parodic nightmares of the effete snob-flitting across the screen. It's as if every poet had to be typecast with a pretentious accent and a stilted wardrobe, T. S. Eliot without the talent. (When it comes to the fatuous portrayal of a poet being inspired by historical events, nothing may be able to top the sentimental, stiff upper-lip vigor of Kipling suddenly being moved to compose a famous poem, which the commanding officer then recites over Din's body, in Gunga Din.) So, too, there was something so radically antic and faussenaif (to employ the word Philip Larkin devised for her), so quirky and fey, so scapular, self mocking, and idiosyncratic about Florence Margaret Smith that I was pretty much expecting to be dispirited on a Friday night in 1981 when I sank down into a comfortably worn seat in a standardized movie complex in a northwest suburb of Detroit to see a film that was having a mild "success d'estime" (as the poet who liked schoolgirl French might have put it).

Stevie is a low budget, low-tech art movie that was filmed in seventeen days in 1978. I find it surprisingly profound, deeply felt, though parts of it, perhaps inevitably, also feel quickly shot, hastily improvised. Many of the flashbacks are no more than single shots, spliced-in visuals. The New York Times reported that Robert Enders, its director and producer, sought funding from more than two dozen American studios before one final studio, Fine Artists, agreed to pick up the total production cost of $500,000.

Much of Stevie also retains the texture and quality -the vestiges-of a theatrical piece adapted into a film. Hugh Whitemore's highly verbal screenplay is based on his own sympathetic dramatic portrait, Stevie: A Play from the Life and Work of Stevie Smith, a two-act which had a notable West-End run at the Vaudeville Theater in 1977 and recurs often to Stevie Smith's own characteristically forthright writings. The movie, like the play, has a tiny cast ofthree characters: Stevie (Glenda Jackson), her unmarried aunt (Mona Washboume), and an unnamed Man (Trevor Howard). Alec McCowen also comes in as Stevie's fiancee Freddy for a single troubling scene from her past, a play within the play.

The film also relies heavily on one setting: Stevie's cluttered, rag-tag sitting-room. The camera isn't stationary-it moves freely around the parlor -but Enders consciously restricts it to a lone, unchanging room for most of the movie. It doesn't take long for us to feel comfortably at home in this mismatched, lived-in room with its lace-curtained bay window, its heavy furniture (an aging upright piano covered with piles of books, a wooden bureau), its vases of dried rushes standing next to potted plants, its framed sepia photographs. This ordinary setting can seem both endearingly dreamy and poignantly enclosed, though that may be appropriate for a poet who committed herself to living in the same house for more than forty years with an older relative in an outer London suburb ("Smart writing people think it is not at all chic to live in the suburbs with an aunt," she admits in the film, "but I don't care what they think . . . I love Aunt and Aunt loves me. That's what really matters") and all her life complained of being enervated and stifled by boredom, at times almost luxuriating in its possibilities ("Sometimes, even now, I indulge in the utmost limit of boredom, so that when the telephone rings it is like an Angel of Grace breaking in on the orgy of boredom to which my soul is committed").

All through the movie one keeps hearing, almost eerily lifted out of chronological order, an amalgam of well-timed excerpts from her three loquacious and revealing novels (Novel on Yellow Paper, Over the Frontier, and The Holiday), her eight ever-startling collections of poems (The Collected Poems of Stevie Smith), and a particularly incisive interview with her friend Kay Dick, Ivy and Stevie: Ivy ComptonBurnett and Stevie Smith. (I'd also recommend the various truant essays, comical stories, and pungent letters posthumously brought together after the play and film were created: Me Again: The Uncollected Writings of Stevie Smith.) Whitemore gets some of the chronology wrong (the play was researched and written before two definitive biographies came out in the 1980s), but he gets the essential feeling right. The screenplay moves fluentlyfreely-between Smith's poetry and prose (she never made a very sharp distinction between them), and as a result the movie is layered with a thick autobiographical substratum-a filmy residueof different genres. It's at bottom a found poem, a spiky love song. Here's a picture that keeps verbally turning, a portrait that keeps moving, a work of art that dramatizes the beguiling mystery, the who-the what-of Stevie Smith.

2. Preparing to Meet Stevie

I may have come into the theater in a skeptical mood (I've never been much of a moviegoer anyway), but I was in truth riveted to the film-I was lost in its world-from its first establishing shot, its initiatory scene. One hears the unmistakable clippety-clop of a horse walking on pavement, and then one sees a horse-drawn carriage pulling up to a row of narrow, semi-detached, middle-class townhomes and letting out two Edwardian-looking women with two small girls in tow. This turns out to be the three-year-old Peggy, her five-year-old sister Molly, her mother and her aunt, and they're arriving on an autumn afternoon at their end-of terrace house in suburban London, 1906. It's as if we're overseeing the decisive moment of their entry into Palmers Green from a neighbor's upperstory window across the street. The camera slowly zooms in on the four of them pausing on the sidewalk in front of their new home, a little female band sizing it up, as if taking in the future and all it contains, all it means. One of the women holds the girls' hands and gathers them protectively to her, the other opens the front gate and steps toward the house. A deep pause-a hushed intake of breath-for a turning point in four lives. The driver is unloading the suitcases from the carriage, but otherwise everything is silent, stilled, bathed in a blanched yellow light that evokes the past with grainy poignancy, like an early home movie. The film returns to this faded, almost wavering sepia light whenever it cuts back to the past. It does so often. The light itself acts as a memory screen to a world irrevocably gone.

The second scene, second tableau: a man opens the door to a front parlor-the sitting-room-and pauses in the doorway. He steps into the middle of the room and pauses again, slowly looking around, surveying a landscape. An aura of sadness permeates the air. It's nearly seventy years later and the inhabitants have now passed on, alI the furniture is covered with white sheets. The whole house, which will turn out to be one of the main characters in the film as it was in Stevie Smith's life, has a funereal aura, like a figure in mourning. A world has been wiped out. The nameless Man, played with grave formal acuity by Trevor Howard, will become the film's narrator, its omniscient thirdperson conscience, its somber Greek chorus. He moves wistfully through a Buttered room he knows well, lifts a small pillow-a back cushion-from a well-worn chair and drops it, as if sighing, wanders across the room to a glassed-in bookcase, which he opens. He picks out the text he's looking for, turns toward the camera, toward each of us, leafs through it to the opening page, and begins at last to speak, to read aloud:

"`Life is like a railway station,' Stevie said: `The train of birth brings us in, the train of death will carry us away.'"

"Hmm," the man murmurs to himself, register ing what he has just said. Then he doses the book with a small thump and introduces the film itself, as if lifting a curtain: "All aboard for a trip to the suburbs!"

Trevor Howard's prologue speech is followed by the unmistakable blast of a moving train. We're hurled into the present tense. For one moment, one long shot, it's as if we're at the front window of that train, looking ahead, as if in a daydream, approaching a dark tunnel. Sitting in a darkened movie theater among strangers, entering another world to the rhythm of a moving train. There's the dose-up of a train passing-we're both inside and outside that train, looking on. We've been thrust into modern-day London, preparing to meet Stevie herself riding home on her daily commute. The camera pulls back so that we can see her wearing a yellow winter coat and reading a book. We encounter her in the present tense-a middle-aged woman putting away her book, gathering her things and heading for the door while the long red train pulls into the station.

It's a gray winter day, a chill nip in the air. This will be the gloomy weather-the stark backdrop-- for the entire film. While the music comes up and the white-lettered credits flash onto the screen, we track Smith marching home from the Southgate Station down the well-trod lanes of a woodsy suburban park. There's an iron-gray lake in the background, ducks floating on a misty pond. She comes out of the park, turns down a street we now recognize, and comes to the familiar white-trimmed redbrick house. We've entered in mid-stream. But, in a sense, the whole film operates in the space between its two opening frames. The director offers us a portrait cast in time. It has the retrospective glow-the mournful aural-of death, but it also has the jubilant texture of a life-a sensibilityrescued from oblivion and held up to the light.

3. "A House of Mercy"

I'm conscious of the fact that I was at full import from the very beginning of this film because I was already steeped-hell, I was soaked-in Stevie Smith's work. It's a different-and perhaps lesser -film for those who are coming to Smith's work for the first time, who are unaware of its deadly innocence, its zany humor and torrential pain. It's an appealing but more introductory work for those who couldn't use it, as I did, to blood the work and gasp back into the poems. It takes its time to build its rhythms, accrue its meanings. But I was, in a very real way already predisposed, already prepared, to over-read Stevie, my strategy here, my guilty pleasure. My foot was on the pedal. My immediate and deeply emotional response to the film was predicated upon my relationship to its subject. It may even be at times incommensurate with the film's cinematic achievement, its status as a free-standing and wholly realized work of art in its own right, though not, I believe, with Smith's own work, her quirky hymns to death, her lived poetry. Yet I also trust the way the film insinuates itself-and propels Stevie-into the affective lives of its viewers.

Any lingering doubts I initially may have had about the basic veracity of the film were erased as soon as Glenda Jackson appeared in the screen. I'm still inspirited by how authentically she captures-she incarnates-Smith's signature style, her particular way of voicing herself, of being in the world. How naturally, too, Jackson carries off Stevie's distinctive look: the straight pageboy haircut with a loose fringe of bangs, the English schoolgirl outfit (a black long-sleeved top with a white peter pan collar, a locket brooch, and a wine-colored corduroy jumper). It's true that her height is a little jarring (Stevie was barely five feet tall and got her androgynous nickname after a popular jockey, Steve Donoghue) and she may seem a bit too robust to capture the full measure of Stevie's profound chronic fatigue, her physical fragility yet she also captures something of the vulnerability-the unworldly unprotectedness--of this woman who was part elfin child, part caustic adolescent, part disenchanted adult. One thinks of the zestful storyteller, the sardonic comedian, the brainy agnostic, the social critic of class, the stoic philosopher . . . "I'm straightforward, but I'm not simple," Stevie told a friend near the end of her life. She was a complex, mercurial, and, in some ways, insoluble figure.

The drama kicks off from the moment Stevie comes through the front door of the house at t Avondale Road and calls out in a high voice, "I'm back! I'm back! Where are you?" to her Aunt Margaret who is upstairs folding sweaters and putting them away in a dresser drawer. She's whistling as she does her housework-this sweet, practical person who, unlike her niece, seems entirely at home in the world. "Up here!" she calls back. Her whole demeanor brightens when she hears Stevie's voice. "Just coming," she says, hurrying down the stairs. She'll hang up her niece's coat, make a pot of tea, bring in a snack tray with Battenburg cake and ginger nuts.

"I'm utterly exhausted, worn to a frazzle," Stevie declares in one of the leitmotifs of her adult life: When I'm asked on the Day of judgement what I remember best and what has ruled my whole life, I think I shall say: 'Being tired, too tired for words.'

But she's soon revived, warming up at the electric heater built into the fireplace, launching into a tale about recording a short story at the BBC as her aunt comes back into the room.

"This is my aunt," Stevie says directly to the camera, bringing the audience into the sitting-room with them, like a new acquaintance. "I call her 'The Lion of Hull.' She looks very lion-like, don't you think?"

Aunt Margaret is preoccupied. She's searching through the piles of books stacked on the piano. Too many books for her taste. Stevie was a voracious reader. "A poet reading books is hungry for food," she said. By the time that Aunt ("Not a literary person, thank God," Stevie declares) calls out "Where are my glasses, Peggy?" and her niece answers "In the fruit bowl," we've entered into the zone of their domestic intimacy and mutual dependence. One of Stevie's late poems calls this "a house of female habitation" and "a house of mercy," a somewhat stern and reserved "Being of warmth."

4. Speaking to the Camera, Talking to Lion Aunt

One striking feature of the performance is how naturally-how intimately-Jackson addresses the camera throughout the film. It's as if she is turning away from the conversation with her aunt to enter into another one with us. ("I spoke to the camera as a person," she told one interviewer.) This carries over to the confident, conversational way she recites Smith's poetry throughout the film. Jackson was apparently edgy and apprehensive about reciting poetry directly into the camera, but had a breakthrough when the director suggested that she should think of the camera as a guest in her home. ("You don't always look at a person when you are speaking," the actress said: "It was more interesting than pretending I was talking to cinemas full of people.") The wisdom of this is evident in the final version: when Jackson recites poetry in the film one feels like a welcome visitor, a confidant, a co-conspirator.

Jackson also seems to have internalized the feeling in Smith's lyrics, which she also recordedperhaps a little too somberly-for Argo Record Company (Glenda Jackson Reads Stevie Smith, 1978). Reciting the poems aloud as if to a guest gives them an intimate spontaneity. At times she effectively says them as if musing to herself. The down side of the film's approach may be that all the poems seem content driven, primarily used to support the poet's biography-rather than the other way around. Yet a poet's biography primarily resides in the pattern of sounds she makes, the words she uses and arranges. (Stevie Smith liked to refer to her poems as "sound vehicles.") Some of the lines are also wrenched out of their fictive contexts to give them biographical applicability. Yet the supple strength of this approach is that the poems also seem to come bursting forth from Stevie's life. They brim up directly from experience-these stabbing intuitions that cried out to be written down and shaped, inscribed, spoken, heard.

Stevie never seemed to have minded that her aunt didn't approve of her work and considered it all a "soppy waste of time." Maybe the aunt's incomprehension gave her the deep privacy-the interior space-she required to do her work. It must at times have taken its toll. The director hit on a device that resonates with-that parallels-Stevie's situation. It's as if our presence gives her the license-the opportunity-to talk away from Aunt, as she did in her own work, to express herself apart from domestic life. Still, there's no doubt Stevie was taken care of and cherished, steadied down and comforted, tethered to daily life by her mother's sister. Something in her was also arrested. "When you live with an old lady from an early age you never cease to be a child," Stevie admitted after her aunt had died. Childhood wasn't so much a stage in her development as an imaginative place she could call on and return to at any time. It was a habitation always available to her. Childhood wasn't something she sought-as it was for, say, Wordsworth-but something she already possessed.

I confess that I find the English stage actress Mona Washbourne utterly endearing as Stevie's "Lion Aunt." Surely I'm not the only viewer who fell for her on first sight. Maybe it's her deeply infectious and affectionate laugh, or the delicious way she savors her sherry ("Where's me sherry?" she calls out in a Yorkshire accent), or even the way she tilts back her head and looks directly at her niece, declaring, "I've never heard such nonsense." She's the Old World aunt, or great-aunt, each of us should have had. (All through the movie I felt I recognized her from some place, and only later realized I had encountered her as Henry Higgins's stalwart, kind-hearted, practical-minded housekeeper in the film version of My Fair Lady ) Washbourne embodies the aunt's sterling, dependable, almost regal figure, a simple, stout, tender-hearted, no-nonsense, feet-on-the-ground sort of person (her favorite conversational refrain is "stuff and nonsense!"), an imposing woman wearing a fresh, brightly-patterned floral dress. (Stevie quips whimsically that her aunt looks like an advertisement for Carter's Seeds: "I call it, `Every One Came Up!"') Auntie Lion's dark, frizzy hair looks as if it's been crimped under a red-hot iron every night for the past forty years.

Watching Mona Washbourne as she takes things in hand, moving briskly around the house, reading her newspaper and calling out the sports scores or the murder stories, chiming in on Stevie's memories with an earthy, matter-of fact interest, I kept thinking of the way Stevie's alter ego, Pompey Casmilus, introduces her surrogate mother in Novel on Yellow Paper.

This Lion has a very managing disposition, is strong, passionate, affectionate, has enormous moral strength, is a fine old Fielding creation.

Later, Pompey hilariously describes her aunt dressed as a fan for a church bazaar, and then rapidly adds an apology:

Darling Auntie Lion, I do so hope you will forgive me for what I have written. You are yourself like shining gold.

Mona Washbourne is the worthy vehicle of this feeling, a noble, sweet-tempered lion sprung to life.

The affectionate interplay and symbiosis between Stevie and her aunt is one of the sturdy pleasures of the film, a clear hold-over from the play, which first brought Jackson and Washbourne together. "Hmm! Well now, where shall I begin?" Stevie asks, settling in with a steaming cup of tea.

"Begin at the beginning and go through to the end, that's what I always say," Aunt declares with typical common sense.

5. "Stevie's Fate"

Stevie commences the story of her life with her birthday: September 20, 1902, a Virgo ("Rather a prim sign I always think, so I like to pretend I'm a bit of a Libra, too") while her aunt adds additional facts and memories. ("A Yorkshire lass, born in Hull. Thirty-four Delapole Avenue, such a nice house.") This gives the film the texture of a reminiscence between two people who have comfortably spent their lives together. It also provides the scaffolding for the main biographical narrative.

What we are treated to is the somewhat cropped and necessarily compressed dramatic through-line of Stevie's story, her life condensed into a couple of emblematic hours, her fate. Her mother's unsuitable marriage. How her father deserted the family and ran away to sea ("What folly it is that daughters are always supposed to be/ In love with papa. It wasn't the case with me"). How Margaret took her sister, who had a weak heart, and her two sickly nieces, and moved with them into Palmers Green when it was still a lovely rural hamlet, a country village. "I still find it very dreamy and poetical," Stevie says, looking out the window at this suburban site of her childhood, adolescence, maturity, old age . . .

It was Stevie's lot to be sickly. "Fate, I suppose. Stevie's fate," she sings out, half mockingly, half in earnest. "Oh, I believe in fate, I really do."

The film cuts to the blanched light of the past, and the camera slowly closes in on a young girl's face mooning in a single square pane of glass. The other curtains are all closed. She has a look of pained homesickness on her face. She waits there until a nurse comes to pull her away. The sudden whimper of a child's voice somewhere in the background.

The trevor Howard figure appears at momentous turning points, as if he is the exterior voice of Stevie's fate itself. He's there to deliver the dark news, the mournful tone, while in the background John Williams's haunting guitar solos inflect a general mood of ominousness. All through the movie the original music by Patrick Gowers creates an almost subliminal feeling-the unconscious texture -of sadness and melancholy, the mood of fatefulness. The nameless man sits on a park bench on a wintry day He's holding a cane and wearing black gloves. He's there to convey the doomed undercurrent-the fatal music-in Stevie's life and work:

It's like a man playing cards, Stevie said. There's the man himself, and the cards he's playing, and there's another man watching over his shoulder. The player is life, the watcher is the spirit, and the cards are fate. Stevie's fate was unfortunate, to say the least. It was tuberculosis.

Stevie contracted tubercular peritonitis and spent three years on and off in the Yarrow Convalescent Home, Broadstairs, on the Kent Coast. She was precocious about death and claimed that the thought of suicide actually came to her for the first time when she was eight years old. It didn't depress her at all. "The thought cheered me wonderfully," she said. I like the way Jackson lights a cigarette and leans into the story while her aunt obliviously reads the paper. A telling moment. There's a huge part of her inner life that was always a secret from her companion. Jackson catches the stoic black humor in Smith's defining subject, how she often brought an odd brightness to the thought of oblivion.

'Life may be treacherous,' ! remember thinking to myself, 'but you can always rely upon Death.' it also occurred to me that if one can remove oneself from the world at any time, why particularly now? I realized that Death is my servant; he's got to come when I call him . . .

The idea of Death (Smith always capitalized the word, as if it were a proper noun) as a devoted servant, a god one can call on to terminate suffering at any time, is one of the recurrent motifs in her mature work, and the playwright might well have quoted the Virgilian lines that Smith invented for her adaptation of Dido's Farewell to Aeneas":

"I cannot help but like Oblivion better," she wrote with some self amusement, "Than being a human heart and human creature." She seems always to have been prepared to call on the proud, tarrying, slippery figure of Death to carry her away in his arms. She did so in a jaunty, colloquial style that was part Mother Goose, part John Donne, and has archaic roots in the oldest pagan-Christian English poetry. No wonder Sylvia Plath was such a great admirer of Smith's poems. She recognized them.

Early in the film, Jackson sits on the couch and recites "Tender Only to One" with a simple evocative clarity. The speaker of this poem is playing a girl's game in which she plucks the petals of a flower to determine who will be her "lover." It's an adolescent game of chance-or narrowing fate. The game takes a startling turn in the final stanza:

Tender only to one,

last petal's breath

Cries out aloud

From the icy shroud

His name, his name is Death.

6. "One of Many"

Stevie eventually recovered from TB and came home to Avondale Road, to moments of a sunny childhood, a golden peacetime interlude. Belief in progress, in God. She reminisces gleefully about two old ladies who were neighbors, Miss Jessie and Miss Emily, about her experiences at school ("Schoolgirl Stevie," Jackson whistles with a raucous chuckle, a giddy high-pitched laugh), including a headmistress who recited her own Victorian moralistic verses at morning prayers. ("Oh, that's rather good,"Aunt says sweetly after Stevie recites a particularly bad one.) Stevie's childhood reading, her jaunts in the woods, her love of nursery rhymes and fairy tales. There's an effective recitation in which Stevie, standing up straight as if at a school recital or kneeling primly on the floor next to the fireplace, and the Man outside, standing incongruously in a children's playground, pushing a swing, alternate reciting a medley of lines and stanzas from four of Stevie's childhood poems ("The After-Thought," "Cool as a Cucumber," "The Fairy Prince," and "The Wanderer"), which are so happily gruesome, Edward Lear by way of Edgar Allan Poe. The result is a dialogue between the inner world and the outer one, between safety and danger, warm comfort, cold reality. "Yes, there's a lot of sadness in these poems," Stevie confesses,

but that's because one soon realizes how brief it all is; schooldays, summer holidays by the seaside, those cloudless September afternoons. Sooner or later adult fears are bound to seep in. Hey-ho, indeed they are. Sooner or later you're bound to realize that you're just another human being, nothing special, just an ordinary mortal like everyone else. What a terrifying moment that is.

The dialogue turns back to poetry when the Man recites "One of Many," a poem Smith scarily referred to as a self portrait, a diabolic parable that exaggerates this sentiment so much that it is transfigured into a murderous rage. The unconscious is unleashed in Smith's spookily violent poem, and a lost innocence grows into a poisonous fury.

This poem is cheerfully illustrated in The Collected Poems with one of Stevie's stick figure sketches of a child hanging.

Stevie's mother was also one of many cut off before her time. Stevie was sixteen when her mother died-not a young girl of ten or twelve as she appears in the film-and Stevie never entirely recovered from the devastating loss. A somber dirgelike music seems to announce a death. There's a hearse pulling up to the house on Avondale Road, a band of three emerging in black, the slow procession to the cemetery, the ceremony by the grave. Black crosses in a blasted cemetery landscape. It's all witnessed from afar. At home the camera closes in on the Victorian-looking mother standing by a curtain. She seems alive, but spookily still, unmoving. The camera pulls away-it was only a photograph-to Stevie picking up the framed picture in her hands. Stevie always felt choked, impotent, enraged about her mother's premature passing. She could contemplate her own death with equanimity and even eagerness, but she could never accept the death of her loved ones. "The nurses said my mother died quickly in a minute," Jackson bitterly muses, "but how long is that minute?" The answer hangs unspoken in the air: an eternity.

Stevie sits at a table, looking down. She has been lost in thought-some of the flashbacks take place in her mind. They are involuntary memories, inescapable glooms from a downward-sinking Proust. Anyone who knows Stevie Smith's work knows that she could get lost in sadness, overwhelmed by the past, pulled under by grief, but Jackson also catches the way she pulled herself back together, shaking her head ("Brrr!") and getting up, clearing away the memory, the mood, wiping the slate, interspersing her sentences with a signature heyho (part sigh, part ironic chuckle). Bringing herself back from the brink into the world again, the present tense. Calling out "sherry" in a high, carrying falsetto that her aunt never seemed to miss. Giving a hearty whooping laugh at one of Aunt's dismissive responses to her ideas. Smoking too much. Stevie moves to the window and says:

By and large I'm a forward-looking girl and don't stay where I am. 'Left, right, be bright,' as I said in a poem.

Whitemore is lifting here a key saying-key attitude-of Novel an Yellow Paper. "Above all I try to avoid getting too despairing. I try to remember what they said in the thirteen hundreds: Accidie poisons the soul stream."

7. Love: The War Room

Through its heroine's eyes, Novel on Yellow Paper also narrates the story of Stevie's two primary love affairs, the first with a German student named Karl, the other with a London suburbanite she wrote about as Freddy (his real name was Eric Armitage). The film takes up both, reminiscing about the first, enacting the second. Stevie came by hard knowledge when it came to the subject of erotic and romantic love. She was wayward, fierce, and repressed. The passionate affair with Karl foundered on nationality, came apart over politics. "He loved me, but he didn't like the English. I loved him, but I didn't like the Germans," Jackson summarizes. She ranted against the evil that was Germany in the thirties, what the country had become. And so they quarreled and parted.

Stevie and her aunt get into a tiff over the question -the longstanding disagreement-over whether or not Stevie should have married Freddy. This is also the key dilemma in Smith's fiction. "I am a friendship girl, not the marrying kind," Stevie reasserts. To which her aunt replies, "Stuff and nonsense!" Stevie raises her fists in the air in helpless fury. She seethes into the camera, bringing us into it: "Oooh. She doesn't understand, she never has. It is pointless trying to explain." Then she bends over toward her seated aunt, who has lost interest in the argument and disappeared behind her newspaper, and bursts out:

I may look like a pocket Hercules, ha-ha, but I am dreadfully low on energy, and a tired person like me can't respond to love; either it wears her out and she'd rather be dead, or else she sees it as a last desperate clutch upon a hen-coop in midAtlantic. Ahh! Oh, the fights and ecstasies of the spirit and the sad pursuing bones!

By now Aunt is heading for the kitchen. "I think I'll just go and prod the joint," she says.

In a flashback scene, McCowen takes up the role of Freddy. He's a hearty, slightly ridiculous figure who bounds into the house with a tennis racket. "Anyone for tennis?" he asks bouncily. He has been rained out of a match. He's wearing a country club outfit: a striped jacket, a V neck sweater and ascot, white slacks. First he talks to Aunt, who is obviously charmed by him (they share a world) and then turns his attention to Stevie. It's soon clear that she can't manage their relationship anymore, their engagement. She declares that she's not up to it and blames it on her tubercular glands, her lack of stamina. She insists that she's a friendship girl whose true rhythm is to leave and to come back to people. Freddy won't have any of it. He's incredulous. Stevie turns away from him and recites a biting couplet:

He'll have my heart, if not by gift his knife Shall carve it out. He'll have my heart, my,life.

The scene escalates into a full-scale argument, it reels toward a sudden decisive parting.

Jackson is convincingly vehement, powerfully distraught, but this is one of the few scenes in the film that seems unworthy of its subject. The film lets us down because Freddy is such a caricature of a suburbanite that it's impossible to understand what Smith ever could have seen in him. "Give us a kiss and say you love me," he says, munching an apple and grinning dumbly at Stevie. It's impossible to believe someone of Smith's sensibility could have been attracted to him. Yet in her terrific early poem "Freddy" she had written:

But there never was a boy like Freddy

For a haystack's ivory tower of bliss

Where speaking sub specie humanitatis

Freddy and me can kiss.

Smith was intensely ambivalent about marriage to Armitage, an intelligent man who was also painfully conventional. He wanted a kind of life, of traditional marriage, Smith could never subscribe to. I wish the film had quoted those wonderfully parodic lines from "Freddy":

There's a revealing moment in Ivy and Stevie when Kay Dick asks the writer if she ever nearly married, as Pompey in Novel on Yellow Paper nearly did. Smith's answer, so many years after her broken engagement, still has deep emotional reverberations.

Oh no-well yes, I suppose I did really. At that period I thought it was the right thing to do, one ought to-that it was the natural thing to dohey-ho-but I wasn't very keen on it. Then I felt I couldn't manage it . . .

Smith was unwilling to give up her independence. She questioned the ideology of domesticity, of inscribed gender roles, of marriage. She felt that most young girls, especially in Palmers Green, clung to the idea of marriage like a life raft, as if getting married could somehow make everything right ("It is like the refrain in The Three Sisters," she says with sudden recognition: "It is the leitmotif of all their lives. It is their Moscow"), whereas many times it wouldn't be right at all. Smith had a tremendous anxiety about losing herself to intimacy. She was apprehensive-gingerly-about commitment. She felt she could never maintain herself within marital relations.

There's a key moment in. the film when she tries to explain to Freddy why it would be utterly foolish, utterly suicidal, for them to marry:

"If we get married, I won't be Stevie anymore. I'll be Mrs. Freddy. That's what frightens me."

"It's the same for any other girl," he says uncomprehendingly.

"I'm not any other girl. I'm me."

The scene takes a nasty turn and Freddy erupts cruelly, "You ll die alone, and you'll deserve to. Little pets like you deserve to be lonely "

It's a stab to the heart. "Go to hell!" Stevie yells at Freddy as he slams the door behind him. Irrevocably gone.

Smith's refusal to marry was. necessary for her psychic survival, but the emotional cost of her renunciation was high. She was grief stricken over what she had lost-perhaps not Freddy himself so much as the possibility he must at one time have represented, the possibility of a marital connection, union, a certain recognizable kind of happiness. The recognition that she would never be able to manage it must have been devastating. All her life she suffered from a restless unfulfillment in romantic love. There was a great compensatory love in her relationship with the Lion Aunt, but she was also left with a secret and at times unbearable loneliness, a sense of desperately sinking.

It's years later. Stevie has her head down, her hands folded on the same table. Lost in thought, in memories. Jackson gathers herself together and gives a beautifully hopeless speech that reverberates in the direction of Smith's most famous poem, "Not Waving but Drowning."

It's like escaping from a sunk submarine. You must stand quietly and without panic until the flood-water in the escape room is covering your shoulders, is creeping up to your mouth, and only then when the whole of your escape-room is flooded to drowning point will you be able to shoot up through the escape-funnel, to shoot up forever and away. Then it's over. But when it's over, then it's tearing inside, it's 'tearing in the belly,' and one wishes oneself dead and unborn.

Stevie lights a cigarette with shaking hands, and tells about sitting in a hot bath with tears running . down her face into the water, her fringe awry. How things come to a sad, despairing, bitter end. How slowly time heals wounds, what a poor doctor time is. Jackson brings a deep musing regret to her recital of a sad poem about true love untimely slain, how it will never rise from the grave again.

8. "Not Waving but Drowning"

Behind Smith's work: the understanding that a lot of people carry around a sense of sad deficiency, that they pretend to being ordinary and fitting in, though in truth they don't feel at home in the world at all. They keep up pretenses, but sometimes, as she said, "they get tired and the brave pretense breaks down and then they are lost."

In the film, Stevie notes that she wrote a poem about this once. She got the idea for it from a newspaper report about a man (Jackson pauses for a couple of pregnant beats) drowning.

There's a barren tree standing in the cold, gray lake we saw at the beginning of the film. It seems preternaturally still. Trevor Howard is sitting on the edge of a bench. With deep mournfulness, he recites-he speaks really-Stevie's lethal masterpiece. One feels the grave submarine laughter and the plunging depths behind this poem of fatal misunderstanding.

I had never heard this poem read aloud before, and I was struck anew by its comic awfulness, by the spooky fact that the speaker is already dead but still moaning, still suffering. How the speaker in the second stanza takes on an ordinary social voice, what a couple of people might say about someone while they're drinking beer in a pub. The cliches. The iron shock of the foreshortened twelfth line ("They said"). How that turns to the startled contradicting voice of the drowned one himself. His haunted explanation. How each of us who hears this little twelve-line poem, whether for the first or the fiftieth time, immediately recognizes it, knows it to be true.

After he recites the poem, the unnamed Man, poor chap, walks away from us down the wide path through the park. One more sign of departure. Let darkness fall.

9. Not Waving but Working

Stevie always felt out of step in the workaday world. She was much too brainy for her job. She went to secretarial college rather than university, and then got a job as a private secretary in a magazine publishing company, Newnes, Pearson, where she worked for thirty years. "I've been there almost the whole of my so-called, ha-ha, working life," Jackson declares: "All that capitalismus toil is very difficult and exasperating indeed . . . "

Stevie let it be known that she was never really too overburdened at work. She liked her boss, and she stole a good deal of work time for her own writing. Sometimes she invited friends round for tea and hot buttered toast. She even suggested that if she had never been forced to work she would have become "some sort of invalidish person and never done any writing." She claimed that exile from domesticity produced her poems.

She also confessed, however, that she was never cut out for the business world. She didn't fit in. The pressure of daily life with its crushing routines, the pressure of having to earn a living for decade after decade, the inner isolation, could be overwhelming for a person so dreadfully low on energy, so temperamentally inclined toward despair. "Deeply morbid deeply morbid was the girl who typed the letters," she wrote. It's telling-it certainly wasn't accidental-that she was sitting at her office desk on a gloomy day in y53 when she tried to commit suicide by slashing her wrists. It was just two months after she had written "Not Waving but Drowning."

It's a devastating moment in the film when Stevie's attempted suicide arises-even for those of us who know it's coming. The sadness of the scene -the black melancholy music-is nearly unbearable. It begins neutrally enough with a train coming from a distance and passing under a bridge. (The moving train is one of the refrains in this film, its clear way of marking passageways.) Then the Man is walking slowly toward us across that same bridge. It's a bleak day and something is awry. He intones:

For most of her life Stevie followed an unchanging routine. Every morning she caught the train to her office near the Strand, and every evening she traveled back to Palmers Green, to Avondale Road, and to the Lion Aunt. Life is like a railway station, Stevie said. One day they brought her home early in great distress. Her wrists were bandaged.

White the Man is still talking-explaining-a black taxi is pulling up to the house. Watching the film for the first time, I'm sure I flinched, I almost had to hold up an arm to fend off the sight of Stevie being helped out of that car, crossing her arms as if to hide her wrists, while her worried and shocked aunt waits helplessly by the front door. She's near tears. Stevie goes into the house.

Trevor Howard recites some relevant lines from "Death Came to Me":

I took the knife

Its cruel edge would bite

Into my flesh

Had I the resolution or the art

To bear the smart

And drive it to my heart?

Stevie appears in the corner of the bay window. She looks utterly forlorn, defeated, half mad. The sense of a person drowning is intense. But she doesn't drown. The Man summarizes: "Death, that sweet and gentle friend, failed to respond to her summons. Life continued."

10. Death of a Lion

To her enormous relief, Stevie was retired-pensioned off-from work after her failed suicide attempt. She was greatly remorseful about what had happened, she said, not because of the violent act itself, or at least not only because of the act, but because of the pain she had inflicted on others: Her aunt, her friends in the office, her boss, whom she contended was dreadfully upset but not hugely surprised. ("He knew. Oh yes, he knew.") It shouldn't have happened at the office, she admitted. And so she tried to forget about what she referred to as "that suicide business." She soldiered on.

Mona Washbourne wonderfully portrays the Lion Aunt getting older, forgetting things. She goes out less and less. One looks in on her at night in a plaid bathrobe, her hair combed down for bed, at times in braids. Worrying about the income tax, about Stevie who has just come back from another party, wearing a buttercup-yellow dress and complaining that she looked like one of the sheeted dead.

Suddenly in the film, as so often in life, Aunt is an old lady. It's terrifically difficult for her to cross the sitting-room to her favorite chair. She collapses into it, wheezing heavily, as if she has just run several miles. She's too weak to pick up the soppy blanket dropped on the floor. "Peggy, Peggy," she calls out, like a great distress signal. Peggy tucks her in, promising a special treat after she finishes her salad. How her face lights up with radiant joy when she gets her favorite treat-junket pudding. "Ooh, ooh, what a lovely lunch," she gushes. Her sweet nature is staggering. Everyone I've known in such situations has been impossible to deal with, utterly enraged. No wonder Stevie would move heaven and earth for her.

"Dearest Lion Aunt," she asserts, tenderly applying the words a wife says to her husband in the poem "The Starling":

I will never leave you darling

To be eaten by the starling

For I love you more than ever

In the wet and stormy weather.

While Aunt snoozes in the chair-this is the same chair where the narrator pauses with so much wistfulness in the second scene of the film-Stevie stoops beside her and strokes her cheek. "There's little laughter where you are going," she says softly, "and no warmth." Stevie can't bear losing her aunt, but insists she doesn't care about her own survival. One comes to believe her. By the end of the speech, she has worked herself around to praising Death again. "I don't know why people are taught that Death is a calamity," Stevie says memorably: "I think he must be rather a dish."

Stevie and Aunt have reversed roles. As the Lion becomes more childlike, Stevie increasingly mothers her. Niece runs the house now. Domestic, uncomplaining. Cooking. Housework. Writing. The so-called occasional sherry. "I look after someone who used to look after me," Stevie wrote simply in her personal essay, "Simply Living." "I like this. I find it more enjoyable than being looked after. And simpler." One remembers the explanatory lines from "A House of Mercy":

Now I am old I tend my mother's sister

The noble aunt who so long tended us,

Faithful and true her name is. Tranquil.

Also Sardonic. And I tend the house.

In the film, Stevie doesn't recite these lines. Perhaps consciously, perhaps unconsciously, the screenwriter gives Stevie lines that originally were meant to apply to her mother and aunt, but now so aptly also apply to her aunt and herself:

The shot of a yellow light reflected through a curtain in the upstairs window The treading notes of a guitar. Aunt is confined to the upstairs bedroom now. Lying weakly in bed. Stevie fusses, changes the hot water bottle, watches over her. She sits in a chair in a darkened room while Aunt sleeps her life away. She's lit by a small lamp behind her. This is the moment in the film, while the Aunt is on the verge of death, that Stevie names herself an Anglican agnostic and takes on Christianity. She loved the hymns, which were always deep in her, but refused the consolations of religion because she did not believe they were true. This is the tough-minded woman who rejected the sweetness of Christianity as well as what she called its hideous cruelty. She would be one of Larkin's less-deceived.

I'm strongly affected by the way Jackson recites "Thoughts About the Doctrine of Eternal Hell." While the camera closes in on her face illuminated in the dark room, she says it with great conviction, pressing home her argument with ferocious intensity, fiercely biting down the final lines:

Who makes a God? Who shows him thus?

It is the Christian religion does.

Oh, oh, have none of it,

Blow it away, have done with it.

This god the Christians show

Out with him, out with him, let him go.

In the written text, the emphatic change from a capital G to a small gin the Lord's name (from God to god) enacts the brave renunciation.

Stevie felt that we should accept loneliness, not make a theology of it by inventing an all-powerful deity. She said memorably: "If I had been the Virgin Mary, I'd have said: No, no, I'll have no part in it, no savior, no world to come, nothing."

For me, the most poignant scene in the film is the death of the Lion Aunt. (Washbourne looks as if she's somewhere in her eighties, though Margaret Annie Spears was in fact 96 years old when she died in 1968). Leaning back against her pillow, half propped up, calling out weakly to Peggy for a drink of water. The touching way that Aunt reaches over with effort and Stevie takes her hand. Stevie says--talking partly to herself, partly to us: "People think because I never married I know nothing about the emotions. They are wrong." She looks intently into her aunt's face. "I loved my aunt."

There's a chill, a small shock, in the fact that she is already using the past tense. A close-up of Stevie's two hands covering her aunt's hand. The camera moves up along the body to focus on Aunt's face on the pillow. Slowly, almost uncannily, with her eyes still closed, Washbourne turns her head in our direction. There's a look of great repose on her face, which is partly in shadow, partly in light. The slightest trace of an inner smile. Death as an end and remedy. And then the traditional cinematic signal from the outside: a curtain closing across the darkening upstairs window.

I myself had grown so attached to the spirit of the Lion Aunt incarnated through Washbourne that the first time I saw the film I began to cry at her death and couldn't quite stop myself. I think I was in tears about it, on and off, for much of the rest of the movie. I knew even at the time that there is a deep reverberation for me with the death of my own practical-minded grandmother, whose name was Anna. I still get an icy shiver every time I come across the first stanza of Stevie's memorial poem to her aunt, "Grave by a Holm-Oak":

You lie there, Anna,

In your grave now,

Under a snow-sky,

You lie there now.

Worlds pass away with these tender, tough-minded women who gave us so much of their ferocious loyalty, their strength.

11. "Do Take Muriel Out"

Stevie would be next. The film makes it seem as if Stevie's death and her aunt's were widely separated by a span of years, but in fact Stevie followed her aunt into the ground just three years later. So we enter the final movement of the film, its last act.

The narrator doubles as one of many friends Stevie collected near the end of her life, taking on the urbane persona of someone on the literary fringe. He is driving slowly through the rain, talking to us through the windshield wipers about how he first met Stevie sometime after the war at a noisy, quasibohemian gathering. Stevie mostly complained about George Orwell, who had been her producer at the BBC (the film doesn't mention that the two were consistently rumored to have had an affair): "'He keeps lying to me,' she said. 'I'm bored to death with all the lies."'

All Stevie's car-owning friends complained that she imperiously expected to be ferried around London. The tiresome duties had reached a peak with Stevie becoming, as the Man puts it, "something of a star-turn on the poetry reading circuit." Even so, he says, pausing at the front door, "my affection for her has remained unimpaired"-he takes a long breath and laughs a little to himself-"relatively." The timing is impeccable. Then he rings the bell.

Stevie enters the sitting-room wearing a badly dyed green suit. She wants to know how it Looks. Very nice, the Man says, meaning terrible. (The time she wore it to a poetry reading was in fact notorious.) Stevie taking her time to get ready, dithering around, trying to decide if she should wear a brooch or a locket, changing her plans about possibly staying overnight (she wants to, if asked; he can't), pouring herself a drink. They fall into petty bickering. Here we're treated to Stevie's difficult side. A willful woman who needs to be cherished, the least likeable of her personae. But then the Man says an acute thing about one of Stevie's readings, which I've always suspected to be true because it jives with other accounts:

I remember once sitting at the back of a cheerless school hall while Stevie pranced about on the stage, chanting her poems like an elderly Shirley Temple. It should have been embarrassing, but it wasn't; it was touching, truthful, and haunting.

Listening to the off kilter chant and odd gait of a poet who loved to echo-and fracture-hymns and folk tunes, traditional ballads, whose quirky natural idiom lifted poetry in the direction of song, one was always conscious of poetry as an oral phenomenon, a physical medium, a bodily art. Perhaps wisely, Jackson veers away from Smith's notably performative way of reading her lyrics aloud. Near the end of the film however, she does give one highly intonated and haunting recital of a few stanzas from "Do Take Muriel Out," which she starts by intoning and ends by singing, like her real-life counterpart. The feeling is so strong that I wish she had been let loose to recite the entire poem.

It's incredibly hard to describe the rhythm of a film, its silent visual simultaneities, its tones, its pacing. The matter is complicated when there is music in the background, establishing a mood, creating a feeling, and an actor bringing poetry to the forefront. Here, looking in the oval mirror on the wall (we can see the Lion Aunt's chair reflected on the other side of the room), Jackson begins to speak slowly and in a steeply low voice:

Do take Muriel out

She is looking so glum

Do take Muriel out

All her friends have gone.

Jackson turns around and by now is singing the third stanza, so that it sounds almost Germanic ("there is something of the Gretchen song-in it," Smith once said). She makes her way across the room and stops in the center. She sings the final stanza. For weeks afterward I walked through my days with the exact melodramatic timbre of Jackson's voice ringing in my head. Years later I can still close my eyes and see her, slowly-vehemently -swinging her arms from side to side; I can still hear her inviting Death, like a suitor, to take poor gloomy Muriel on a final eager date:

Do take Muriel out

Although your name is Death

She will not complain

When you dance her over the blasted heath.

A penultimate marker. We're inside a train fast approaching a black tunnel. It's moving at high speed toward a circle of light gradually becoming clearer and larger on the other side. The inference is clear: the dark music of time passing, the approaching brightness of Stevie's longed-for oblivion.

Stevie comes through the front door of the house. She's wearing a round black hat that she bought for five shillings at a rummage sale. Her hair is gray now, she has a pronounced limp. She moves around the sitting-room and talks about living alone ("It's wonderfully dreamy to be in a house all by yourself"), about her new-found celebrity, about reading Gibbon's Decline and Fall ("I never tire of it") and Agatha Christie in French ("Her murders are so polite"). How Death will come to her at the end with the pleasure of certainty.

Jackson launches into Stevie's account-by now almost legendary-of receiving the Queen's gold medal for poetry. She recounts it with great esprit -the trip to Buckingham Palace, the giggly time she had in the outer room with a lady-in-waiting ("she asked me to say one of my poems, so I hissed a short one under my breath, well, you know, the one about the poor debutante all alone at the grand ball"), how she was ushered in by a naval man to meet the Queen Mother herself-a charming figure-who gave her the medal and motioned her to sit down. How the poor darling kept asking her about poetry: "She made me, feel very like a schoolgirl again, being interviewed by a rather cordial headmistress." Telling the Queen that she had written a lot about murder lately, which elicited a frozen smile. Walking out backwards and at the end a taxi to a restaurant for a celebratory lunch, and then back to Avondale Road.

Stevie pauses at the end of her story, and one feels her trying to get her emotions under control. She looks stricken. "I did so wish the Lion Aunt could have been alive to see it." She moves around to the back of her aunt's chair. "Perhaps she would have changed her mind about my writing. Perhaps not." For a moment she pulls herself up and imitates her aunt's posture and voice: "Stuff and nonsense!" Then she gives her own signature: "Perhaps she was right, hey-ho."

Stevie sits in Aunt's chair and removes the black hat which she had worn to meet the Queen ("Per- , haps a bit of a mistake"). The guitar sounds a melancholy backdrop while Stevie recites most of "Black March" with grave solemnity. At the end; she sighs to herself and sits back in Aunt's chair. The light holds steady-intently-on her lined face.

12. "Come Death"

Now for the last time-the final refrain-the train enters a tunnel that is completely black. We stay in that blackness for a few interminable moments listening to a funereal music. When we come out again Trevor Howard is standing in the house with the furniture covered in white sheets. He recounts how Stevie's sister Molly suffered a severe stroke which left her helpless. Stevie went to help and fell ill herself. She wrote to an old friend from the hospital.

Stevie's voice precedes her, reciting the letter, "Dear John . . ." The camera slides slowly down to Aunt's chair where Stevie is relating the story of her illness to a good friend. I know this letter well -it's the last one Smith wrote-but I was nonetheless bowled over by Jackson reciting it entire, by Stevie's account of her illness, her ironic laughter, her sudden inability to speak or read properly She goes through to the end, but near the bottom of the letter, Jackson imitates the great problem Stevie had in speaking correctly at the last. She writes with characteristic self mockery: "I'm not sure I'll be very bright, ha-ha, as so often I cannot speech properly I scramble velly velly well." With tremendour difficulty, Jackson bites out, she stutters twice on the word "Dooo," "Dooo," calmly gathers herself and finishes: "Do forgive me dear John if I have been already over and over this again and again. I hope you are beautifully happy. Love, Stevie."

I've always been moved by this letter, but by the time Stevie had signed off I was pretty much beside myself. I could scarcely see, I was shaking so much I almost couldn't hear the Man returning to declare the inevitable-how Stevie had been diagnosed with a brain tumor and in the end lost the power of speech. In truth, by the end of the film I was sobbing so hard that afterwards my somewhat bemused wife had to walk me around the parking lot for twenty minutes or so to becalm me. I was flooded with grief.

After he finishes, the Man goes back to the parlor door. He pauses and surveys the room for one last time. Then he turns off the light and leaves. There's one last shadowy shot of the Lion Aunt's-chair, which had also become Stevie's chair.

Stevie was 69 when she wrote her last poem. Trevor Howard recites "Come Death (a)" with great dignity. It's deeply fitting that the last words of the film are the words of Stevie's final poem. They fill the mind, the theater, with their faithful summons, their fatal timely music. I was haunted when I first read them so many years ago, I was inconsolable when I first heard them in Stevie. I am still. Yet, in the end, Stevie Smith found at last the peace she had so desperately longed for and needed. She had crossed to the other side. But at least on our side, one hopes, she had joined the company of lasting poets, the greeting figures.

EDWARD HIRSCH'S recent books include How To Read a Poem and Fall in love with Poetry (Harcourt Brace) and Responsive Reading (Poets on Poetry series of The University of Michigan Press).

Copyright World Poetry, Incorporated Jul/Aug 2000
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