SOURCE: "A Memorable Voice: Stevie Smith," in Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1968-1978, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1980, pp. 199-201.

Heaney is a well-known Irish poet and editor. In the essay below, originally published in Irish Times in 1976, he praises the "memorable voice " of Smith's poetry.

Always inclined to the brisk definition, W. H. Auden once declared that poetry was memorable speech. The Collected Poems of the late Stevie Smith prompt one to revise that: poetry is memorable voice. The unknown quantity in my response to the book was the memory of the poet's own performance of her verse, her voice pitching between querulousness and keening, her quizzical presence at once inviting the audience to yield her their affection and keeping them at bay with a quick irony. She seemed to combine elements of Gretel and of the witch, to be vulnerable and capable, a kind of Home Counties sean bhean bhocht...