Feel Everything!

Stacey, Ruth (2025) Feel Everything! Knives, Forks and Spoons Press, Newton-le-Willows, Merseyside. ISBN 9781916590090

Abstract

The subject of Ruth Stacey's poetry collection is Pamela Colman Smith (16 February 1878 - 18 September 1951). Pamela Colman Smith was a British artist, illustrator, writer, publisher, and occultist. She is best-known for illustrating the Rider-Waite tarot deck (also called the Rider-Waite-Smith or Waite-Smith deck) for Arthur Edward Waite. This tarot deck became the standard among tarot card readers, and remains the most widely used today. Smith also illustrated over 20 books, wrote two collections of Jamaican folklore, edited two magazines, and ran the Green Sheaf Press, a small press focused on women writers.
"These are poems of natural grace and confidence, whose readability and joy comes from a Herculean research endeavour. By turns funny, sad and visionary, with an extraordinary imagistic felicity that meets its subject on equal terms. As a collection it raises the bar of what can be achieved with biographical and docupoetics. Sensational." - Luke Kennard

"A remarkable book that captures the unique spirit of Pamela Colman Smith. Ruth Stacey's beautiful poetry collection, Feel Everything!, achieves the difficult feat of shedding light into the mind of Pamela Colman Smith, a woman whose life was filled with major gaps and silences. Meticulously researched, Stacey's poems utilise archival and primary source material to create an intertextual narrative that while fictional, feels true. It is an important contribution to the growing body of work on Colman Smith, a multi-talented artist, writer, and publisher whose achievements were largely neglected during her lifetime."
- Liz Foley O'Connor

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