Stevie Smith's work, like her life, does not readily yield the interesting patterns of change and development favored by literary biographers. She lived in the same house from the age of three until her death in 1971 and held the same job, with the London publishing firm of George Newnes, for some thirty years. She had many friends, but no significant literary relationships. She read little contemporary poetry, and, of her own work, she said to Peter Orr in 1961, "I don't think my poems have changed very much since I started writing." The Times Literary Supplement mentioned her first collection of poetry under the category "Humor," and the sometimes disconcerting mixture of wit and seriousness noted by that early reviewer continued to characterize her later volumes, making her at once one of the most consistent and most elusive of poets. Like the swimmer's gesture in her best-known poem, Smith's...