Poems A Joking Word (2020) By Laura Riding, edited by Mark Jacobs and Jack Blackmore, with an introduction by Jack Blackmore.In April 1929 Laura Riding, then aged 28, stepped off the window-ledge of the London flat she shared with Robert Graves, breaking her spine. Just fifteen months later Jonathan Cape published Poems: A Joking Word, the first comprehensive collection of her poetry, summing up the first half of her meteoric poetic career.

Detailed Description

The collection opens with some of her earliest poems, dating from 1919, which she had originally planned to publish separately as First Poems. It includes the substance of her first two collections, The Close Chaplet (1926) and Love as Love, Death as Death (1928) - and some later poems. Many of these and the author's strange and initially alienating preface rehearse and reflect upon the circumstances of the suicide attempt, and upon her survival and consequent flourishing. Only in recent years have the scope and scale of Riding's ambition and her achievement in poetry and in prose begun to become clear. She has been increasingly recognised as one of the most important poets and one of the most vital figures in twentieth century literature and spirituality more generally. The Trent Editions series has played its part in the more general revival of her work.

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