1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Muriel Spark: A Poet Beyond Competence, May 31, 2006
This review is from: All the Poems of Muriel Spark (Paperback)
Really enjoyed All the Poems of Muriel Spark. Her work is intelligent, witty and not at all concerned with what reviewers on either side of the Atlantic might think. And evidently, Ms. Spark felt that way for over sixty years. Compared to the gobbledygook verse being shoveled our way by legions trained poets, these poems, which come from all periods of Ms. Spark's writing career, truly delight, perturp, shock, amuse, and provoke thought--provoke one to think. I believe I felt something, too.
I checked 22 of these poems as outstanding in the table of contents (one check beside the title) and five of them as beyond-outstanding (two checks beside the title). Those beyond-outstanding I believe are "While Flickering Over the Pages" ( a kind of lament for a "wasp-like" reviewer), "That Lonely Shoe Lying on the Road" (a personal favorite for a personal reason), "Conversation Piece" (an insight into how talking about something sometimes obscures that something), "Bluebell Among the Sables" (pushes through to transcendence) and "Three Kings" (clear in its metaphor and timeless in its message).
This book was a real find, for me, full of well crafted work in both formal and free mode. All the Poems of Muriel Spark should be read as a lifetime of stand-alone poems, since the poems were written over a very long period of time. Don't look for a developed, single theme the poet is striving to present, but the keen eye and verbal prowess of a genuine poet.
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4 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
For Spark Completists Only, April 13, 2004
By A Customer
This review is from: All the Poems of Muriel Spark (Paperback)
One of the greatest and most underrated novelists and short-story writers of the 20th century (Memento Mori, 1959; The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, 1961; The Girls of Slender Means, 1963; The Driver's Seat, 1970; The Takeover, 1976; Loitering With Intent, 1981), Muriel Spark is a visionary and a true original. Despite the genuine and much - commented upon poetic approach she takes when writing fiction, poetry writing itself is not among her authentic talents, as All The Poems Of Muriel Spark (2004) aptly displays.
Readers will be uncomfortably reminded of Spark's onetime T.S. Eliot fixation in many of the early poems, while others attempt and fail to carry off Stevie Smith's idiosyncratic brand of British humor. Only a half dozen are even mildly successful, and these barely worth reading more than once.
The poems are littered throughout the book haphazardly rather than chronologically, but the earlier, better poems are easy to spot even without referring to the contents page. In most cases, Spark's later poetry consists of little more than plays on words and self - conscious, eccentric scribbles that anyone with a free hour and a pencil might produce.
Adding as it does nothing to Spark's literary reputation, this volume would have been better left uncollected.
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