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    Complete Poems
    Complete Poems
    Complete Poems
    Ebook165 pages1 hour

    Complete Poems

    By Muriel Spark

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    About this ebook

    In her foreword to All The Poems (2003) Muriel Spark wrote, 'Although most of my life has been devoted to fiction, I have always thought of myself as a poet. I do not write "poetic" prose, but feel that my outlook on life and my perceptions of events are those of a poet.' Including previously uncollected work, this new edition demonstrates her ear for the rightness of a line and her eye for the telling detail, her command of poetic forms and her ability to rise to the different challenges of freer verse. Spark's poems are witty, idiosyncratic and haunting, transforming the familiar into glittering moments of strangeness, revealing the dark – and light – music beneath the mundane.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIndependent Publishers Group
    Release dateOct 15, 2015
    ISBN9781784101251
    Complete Poems
    Author

    Muriel Spark

    Muriel Spark (1918–2006) was a prolific Scottish novelist, short story writer, and poet whose darkly comedic voice made her one of the most distinctive writers of the twentieth century. Spark grew up in Edinburgh and worked as a department store secretary, writer for trade magazines, and literary editor before publishing her first novel in 1957. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), considered her masterpiece, was made into a stage play, a TV series, and a film. Spark became a Dame of the British Empire in 1993. 

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      Book preview

      Complete Poems - Muriel Spark

      COMPLETE POEMS

      Muriel Spark was born in Edinburgh in 1918. After some years living in Africa, she returned to England, where she edited Poetry Review from 1947 to 1949 and published her first volume of poems, The Fanfarlo, in 1952. She eventually made her home in Italy. Her many novels include Memento Mori (1959), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), The Girls of Slender Means (1963), The Abbess of Crewe (1974), A Far Cry from Kensington (1988) and The Finishing School (2004). Her short stories were collected in 1967, 1985 and 2001, and her Collected Poems I appeared in 1967. Dame Muriel was made Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres (France) in 1996 and awarded her DBE in 1993. She died in Italy on 13 April 2006, at the age of eighty-eight.

      COMPLETE POEMS

      MURIEL SPARK

      with an afterword by

      MICHAEL SCHMIDT

      CONTENTS

      Acknowledgements

      A Note on This Edition

      Foreword to the 2004 Edition (Muriel Spark)

      A Tour of London

      (c. 1950–51)

      The Dark Music of the Rue du Cherche-Midi

      (2000)

      The Yellow Book

      (c. 1951)

      What?

      (2002)

      Verlaine Villanelle

      (c. 1950)

      Edinburgh Villanelle

      (c. 1950)

      Holy Water Rondel

      (c. 1951)

      The Creative Writing Class

      (2003)

      Authors’ Ghosts

      (2003)

      That Bad Cold

      (2003)

      Leaning Over an Old Wall

      (c. 1947)

      Flower into Animal

      (1949/1950)

      Abroad

      (1984)

      Going Up to Sotheby’s

      (1982)

      On the Lack of Sleep

      (c. 1963)

      The Grave that Time Dug

      (c. 1951)

      The Pearl-Miners

      (c. 1952)

      Omen

      (c. 1949)

      My Kingdom for a Horse

      (c. 1956)

      Intermittence

      (c. 1956)

      Letters

      (2003)

      Holidays 30

      (2002)

      Facts

      (2003)

      Complaint in a Wash-out Season

      (c. 1959)

      Litany of Time Past

      (c. 1959)

      The Fall

      (c. 1943)

      Faith and Works

      (c. 1957)

      Conundrum

      (c. 1952)

      The Messengers

      (c. 1967)

      Fruitless Fable

      (c. 1948)

      Note by the Wayside

      (c. 1965)

      Mungo Bays the Moon

      (1996)

      Panickings

      (2003)

      The Hospital

      (2003)

      The Empty Space

      (2002)

      Hats

      (2003)

      Anger in the Works

      (1995)

      Dimmed-Up

      (2002)

      While Flicking Over the Pages

      (1995)

      Standing in the Field

      (1994)

      To the Gods of My Right Hand

      (c. 1954)

      That Lonely Shoe Lying on the Road

      (1993)

      The Victoria Falls

      (c. 1948)

      Conversation Piece

      (c. 1954)

      Elementary

      (c. 1951)

      Against the Transcendentalists

      (c. 1952)

      Shipton-under-Wychwood

      (c. 1950)

      Conversations

      (c. 1965)

      The Card Party

      (c. 1951–52)

      Chrysalis

      (c. 1951)

      Elegy in a Kensington Churchyard

      (c. 1949)

      Evelyn Cavallo

      (c. 1952)

      The Rout

      (c. 1951)

      Four People in a Neglected Garden

      (c. 1951)

      Like Africa

      (c. 1948)

      We Were Not Expecting the Prince To-day

      (c. 1947)

      Communication

      (c. 1955)

      Created and Abandoned

      (c. 1979)

      The Goose

      (c. 1960)

      A Visit

      (c. 1950)

      Bluebell among the Sables

      (c. 1958)

      Industriad

      (c. 1951)

      Canaan

      (c. 1952)

      The Nativity

      (c. 1950)

      The Three Kings

      (c. 1953)

      Sisera

      (c. 1953)

      Report on an Interrogation

      (2006)

      Family Rose

      (1948)

      Nothing to Do

      (2004)

      Is This the Place?

      (2004)

      So near to Home

      (2005)

      Oh, So So

      (2004)

      The Man Who Came to Dinner

      (2004)

      Everything plus the Kitchen Sink

      (2004)

      The Ballad of the Fanfarlo

      (c. 1951)

      From the Latin

      Persicos Odi

      (c. 1949)

      To Lucius Sestius in the Spring

      (c. 1949)

      Winter Poem

      (c. 1949)

      Prologue and Epilogue

      (c. 1949)

      Afterword by Michael Schmidt

      Index of Titles and First Lines

      ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

      Grateful acknowledgements are made to the editors and publishers of the magazines and newspapers in which these poems first appeared.

      The following poems first appeared in The New Yorker: ‘Conversation Piece’, ‘The Dark Music of the Rue du Cherche-Midi’, ‘Edinburgh Villanelle’, ‘The Messengers’, ‘Canaan’, ‘The Card Party’, ‘Created and Abandoned’, ‘The Empty Space’, ‘Holidays’, ‘Mungo Bays the Moon’, ‘That Bad Cold’ and ‘The Lonely Shoe Lying in the Road’. Others appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Times Sophisticated Traveler, Penguin New Writing No. 15, Poetry Quarterly, Scotland on Sunday, The Scotsman, Tatler, and World Literature Today. ‘Report on an Interrogation’ was first published in the UK in the Times Literary Supplement, 24 February 2006; ‘Family Rose’ was first published in the UK in Tatler, January 2007; ‘Nothing to Do’ and ‘Is This the Place?’ were first published in the UK in the Spectator, December 2004; ‘So near to Home’ was first published in the UK in the Spectator, December 2005. ‘Everything Plus the Kitchen Sink’ was first published in the UK in 2004 by Rees & O’Neill. ‘Oh, So So’ and ‘The Man Who Came to Dinner’ are previously unpublished.

      A NOTE ON THIS EDITION

      The order of poems in the 2004 edition, All the Poems, has been preserved, and eight poems added: ‘Report on an Interrogation’, ‘Family Rose’, ‘Nothing to Do’, ‘Is This the Place?’, ‘So near to Home’, ‘Oh, So So’, ‘The Man Who Came to Dinner’, and ‘Everything plus the Kitchen Sink’.

      FOREWORD TO THE 2004 EDITION

      The poems in this book were composed throughout my literary life, from the late 1940s to the present day.

      My editor, Barbara Epler (who, for wisdom, charm, humour and intuition, must be the envy of every author), has here rearranged my poems in an order which, I think, gives more coherence and novelty to a work than would a chronological arrangement. I feel that my poems, like some of my memories, come together in a manner entirely involuntary and unforeseen.

      As far as chronology is concerned, I have no exact records and dates. In my early days I often had to wait years for the eventual publication of a piece of creative work. Some of these poems were written from the late-forties onward, although not published until later. In the list of contents I have tried to indicate by the useful ‘c.’ the year to which I think the poems belong.

      Once, when I went to visit a beloved friend, the poet W. H. Auden, I found him ‘touching up’ his earlier poetry. He told me that he had been unfavourably criticized for this habit, but he felt justified in making the changes because he understood, now in his mature years, what he had really meant but failed to express precisely, when he was young.

      I thought of this when I looked through my poems. In some cases I was not even sure what I meant at the time. Fifty years ago, in some senses, I was a different person. And yet, I can’t disapprove of those poems whose significance

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