Muriel Spark: All The Poems

Some might understandably quibble with her pronouncement, given that this book amounts to little over 100 pages, yet writers often reach achievements by seeing their works as sideshows to the main event. Poetry was evidently an ambition for Spark in the early '50s, the period of nearly half the work here. During World War II, she had worked in intelligence, having left her disturbed husband and her young son behind in Rhodesia, where she had lived for some years. Spark then became editor of The Poetry Society's flagship journal Poetry Review, the first female editor, and, indeed the last single woman editor until recently. It didn't work out, but a collection, The Fanfarlo, appeared in 1952. Its centrepiece was the lengthy and somewhat hallucinogenic title ballad, which today reads as a bit of an oddity.

The mid '50s brought a conversion to Catholicism – unusual for an East Coast Scot from a Jewish family - and a conversion to prose writing. Her first novel came in 1957 and the early '60s brought her acclaim as a novelist. If we are to believe that these are 'all the poems' (a likely story!), then she only returned to poetry a couple of dozen times after the publication of her most famous novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

Spark's influences are difficult to pick out – early on, certainly, there are Eliot and Auden, inevitable influences for her time, and perhaps a twitch or two in the direction of Marianne Moore. Many later poems, including those from a relatively purple patch only a few years ago, are plain-spoken musings on neighbours and day-to-day arrangements. A poem from the 1990s ('Standing In The Field') has a Frostian precision and charm:

The best work in this collection, however, is from early on – 'The Pearl-Miners' is a neat piece of social satire, 'Evelyn Cavallo' is a ghostly musing on a character dreamed up then killed off, while 'Omen' from 1949, though it has a botched ending, displays a pure lyric quality that suggests Spark could have been among the mid-century's finest poets, had she chosen the road less travelled by.