'A Very Deadly Sort of Slave Feeling'

Regardless of her putative subject, Stevie Smith always seems to get around to death. That sounds like a prescription for adolescent morbidity, like a low-budget horror movie. There’s a theory going around, probably rooted in Freudian quackery, that all artistic creation is about death or its denial. Yet, somehow – often formally, with her nursery rhymes and rhythms – Smith charms and amuses us.…