Laura Riding is one of the great twentieth-century poets, but her poems have, until very recently, been little explored and understood. Love as Love, Death as Death (1928), her second collection, was composed after her move from New York to England in 1926, in the course of what was initially an intense love affair and remained a long-lasting literary partnership with Robert Graves.
ISBN 978-1-84233-165-1
Detailed Description
Laura Riding is one of the great twentieth-century poets, but her poems have, until very recently, been little explored and understood. Love as Love, Death as Death (1928), her second collection, was composed after her move from New York to England in 1926, in the course of what was initially an intense love affair and remained a long-lasting literary partnership with Robert Graves.
In the opening poem of her first book, The Close Chaplet (1926), Riding had declared her intention to shun the ‘well-tilled ground’ of lyric poetry in order to reveal her unprecedented vision of the origins of the universe and, crucially, of the role of woman – which are epic themes. The title of this second collection indicates that here, by contrast she is tackling just those most frequented themes of lyrical poetry – Love and Death – directly, afresh and without poetic frills.
With this new book Trent Editions completes a set of three very rare volumes of Riding’s poetry, each one with a substantial introduction exploring the meaning of the poems, the other volumes being The Close Chaplet and Riding’s penultimate and apocalyptic collection of 19033, Poet: A Lying Word.
‘When The Fugitive (1922-1925) flashed down the new sky of American poetry, it left a brilliant scatter of names: Ransom, Tate, Warren, Riding, Crane …. Among them, the inner circle and those tangent to it as contributors, there was no one quite like Laura Riding.’ – Sonia Raiziss
‘… as the words and their rhythms worked upon me and then within me, I found in due course that here were not so much spells as acts of verbal disenchantment, inspired unravellings of the world’s riddle.’ – Robert Nye
‘Laura Riding (1901-1991) was one of the most important English-speaking poets of the 20th century. In Jack Blackmore and Mark Jacobs her work has found the ideal editors and commentators. Thanks to their efforts, in the three volumes of her poems that they have published through Trent Editions, Riding’s unique worth now becomes clear.’ – John Lucas
