cover image All the Poems of Muriel Spark

All the Poems of Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark. New Directions Publishing Corporation, $13.95 (144pp) ISBN 978-0-8112-1576-3

Renowned for decades for her sparely ironic novels, Muriel Spark (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie; A Far Cry from Kensington) began as a poet, and has lately returned to the writing of verse. All the Poems of Muriel Spark mixes her older rhyming poems (most from the 1950s) with the more informal work of the last 10 years. The Scottish-born Spark covers European cities from Edinburgh to Rome, along with the act of writing and the literary world: ""I think that authors' ghosts creep back/ Nightly to haunt the sleeping shelves/ And find the books they wrote.""