Elaine Feinstein, Poetry Review Volume 96:3 Autumn 2006
 Swept, Emptied, Kept

    Muriel Spark is a novelist of genius - elegant, elliptical, endlessly inventive - who began to publish early as a poet and continued to write poetry all her life. This book deliberately arranges her poems out of chronological order, perhaps to prevent the reader peering across curiously at the novels that run alongside them. (The dates are listed in the Contents.) Nevertheless, several poems evoke the world of Spark novels with precision and charm. The spooky 'Card party', for instance, has the atmosphere of The Girl of Slender Means. And many of her poems have that poignancy, at once knowing and sad, which is the true hallmark of Spark's vision:

        Where does she come from
        Sipping coffee alone in London?

        The shoes, the hair - I do not think
        She has anything in the bank (…)

The late poems sometimes abandon that tone of quiet amusement; as in 2000 when she looks back on her own life, cross the history of Europe, in 'The Dark Music of the Rue Cherche-Midi'.

Spark is roughly Larkin’s generation, and like him has little truck with either American poetry or modernism. Even when she writes with a rhythmic freedom, as in 'Canaan', she likes to use rhyme to make her points:

        Time lacks experience. Therefore I am not quite
        Confounded by history,
        Being of the hopeful race of the earth,
        Promised to promise, a mystery to mystery (…)

In a Foreword written not long before her death she speaks of studying verse forms. Clearly she could write in any form she chose, since she has a fine ear. This volume also includes translations from the Latin of Horace and others. These have a languid lyricism she does not often allow herself elsewhere.