This is a book that I really can't "get" on a first reading, so I'm not rating it at this time. I read it for a read-a-thon for the Spark centenary and plan to reread it at the end, after I've gotten a complete grasp of Spark (including biographical, autobiographical, and critical material).

I'm not sure this is a book for anyone other than someone who's looking for "completeness" of reading in the Spark canon.

Three or four of these poems struck me as remarkable. "The Victoria Falls" roared like a mighty cascade; "The Yellow Book" was filled with vivid images; "The Card Party" wickedly good; "The Nativity" clever and profound. Others were simply incomprehensible to me--"A Visit", "Conundrum"--and I know I missed many classical references that would have helped me understand others better. (I confess to having entirely skipped the last section, entitled "From the Latin".) It's been much too long since I studied poetry; what little I once knew of form and meter is long gone. (I can recognize a villanelle when it's called a villanelle.) It's clear to me, though, that Spark was working in many different verse forms over the 55 years covered by this collection. It seems to me quite an impressive body of poetry from a woman I previously knew only as a novelist. One of my favorite poems is entitled "Authors' Ghosts" in which she proposes that authors come back from the dead to revise their works, leaving readers to wonder "Where did this ending come from? I recall quite another." In her introduction, Dame Muriel relates a visit with W. H. Auden, in which she caught him "touching up" some poems he had written as a much younger man. Reminded me of Faulkner, who used so many of his characters in more than one book, and sometimes retold the same story, with significant differences, from one book to another. When asked about these inconsistencies, his response was something like "I know more about people now than I did when I started writing". If I catch him in here some night "touching up" one of his novels, I'll let you all know.

Review written in March, 2009 ( )

Her poetry isn't the best poetry ever. But have you ever written a poem? I mean, a poem that I would want to read? No?
Well, this is a nice bonus for Muriel Spark fans. You go through life knowing that she is a great novelist and then BAM! You find out that she is also a competent poet. You totally weren't expecting that, were you?
I give it four stars based not so much on the quality of the poems as the quality of her work overall and the amazing effort she put into the poems. ( )