Available at last are all the poems by one of the twentieth century's greatest British writers, Dame Muriel Spark: "a true literary artist, acerbic and exhilarating" (London Evening Standard). In the seventy-three poems collected here Muriel Spark works in open forms as well as villanelles, rondels, epigrams, and even the tour de force of a twenty-one page ballad. She also shows herself a master of unforgettable short poems. Before attaining fame as a novelist (Memento Mori, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie), Muriel Spark was already an acclaimed poet. The "power and control" of her poetry, as Publishers Weekly remarked, "is almost startling." With the vitality and wit typical of all her work, Dame Muriel has never stopped writing poems, which frequently appear in The New Yorker. As with all her creations, the poems show Spark to be "astonishingly talented and truly inimitable" (The San Francisco Chronicle).

ミュリエル・スパークの詩は、冷徹な知性と痛烈なユーモアが凝縮された知の結晶です。極限まで削ぎ落とされた言葉が人間の業を暴き出す「力と制御」には圧倒されます。定型から自由詩までを自在に操る彼女の技巧は、読者の魂に消えない刻印を残すほどに鋭利で、あまりに魅惑的です。 映像化作品では彼女の毒気ある視点が鮮烈に補完されていますが、本詩集には活字でしか到達し得ない深淵な沈黙があります。映像の色彩と言葉のリズムが共鳴する時、唯一無二の世界観が真に完成します。両メディアのシナジーが生む極上の知的興奮を、ぜひ全身で享受してください。