On the Side of the Angels: The Second Volume of the Journals of Elizabeth Smart

Opening in the mid forties, 'On the Side of the Angels', the second and final volume of Elizabeth Smart’s diaries, charts her departure from Canada into self-imposed exile in London, the birth of her four children, and her repeated half-hearted attempts to leave the poet George Barker. When her classic autobiographical prose poem 'By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept' was burned and censored in Canada by her mother, Elizabeth placed herself in the social whirl of London in the fifties and sixties, only to return to writing her acclaimed poetry in the seventies and eighties.

‘The moan of the single mother raised to the power of a classic’
DAVID HUGHES, 'Mail on Sunday'

‘What exhilarates is the candour with which Elizabeth Smart looks at despair. Like Stevie Smith, whose wry, elliptical and ironic voice influenced her own poetry, she made her encounter with pain the route to self-realisation. It gave point to her journals. This second selection finds Smart bringing up four children alone, coping with the overdrafts, writer’s block, loneliness and depression. In the wake of her affair with the poet George Barker, who, having fathered her children, remained uncommitted and elsewhere, she realises all too clearly her need for house, husband, money, job, friends, furniture and other things... Her journals became the seed-bed for her other writings’
FRANCES SPALDING, 'Sunday Times'

‘A portrait of a woman who never lost her intelligence or her heightened sense of the absurdity of life. She must lit up any room’
BERYL BAINBRIDGE, 'Sunday Express'

‘Fascinating, searing and revealing’
ANTHONY CRONIN, 'Sunday Independent'