This dark tale in verse, from Smith’s final, posthumous collection, addresses the existence of evil. It was her response to the Moors Murders, although it takes place “in the middle of the last century”. Angel Boley realises that her mother, Malady, and her husband, Hark, are luring children into the kitchen to kill them. So she takes it upon herself to be an avenging “Angel of Death”. Gathering poisonous mushrooms, she puts them “into a soup, and this soup she gave / To Hark, and her mother, Malady, for supper, so that they died”. She is arrested and confined to an asylum, “and soon she died / Of an outbreak of typhoid fever”. It is a vision of a world without ultimate justice, but with a morality, nevertheless, of human judgement (someone keeps writing “She did evil that good might come” on Angel’s gravestone, until the vicar declares it God’s will). Smith’s lack of a happy ending feels like the logical outcome of her unusually flat and rhymeless verse, driven by the necessity of plot from one shocking event to the next, as if deliberately passing over the chance to prettify. 

I will always be grateful to the poet Moniza Alvi for introducing me to this poem when I was supervising her PhD thesis, which argued that Stevie Smith has not been given her due by literary criticism. I sometimes wonder if there is a strange self-portrait in the figure of Angel, who like Smith is perfectly serious about telling the unvarnished truth, but judged by others to be unstable. 

First published in Scorpion and Other Poems, Longman, 1972; reprinted in The Collected Poems and Drawings of Stevie Smith, Faber and Faber, 2015, ed. Will May