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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 811.52
EAN num: 9780892552580
ISBN number: 0892552581
Label: Persea Books
Manufacturer: Persea Books
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 528
Printing Date: 2001-07
Publishing house: Persea Books
Sale Popularity Level: 883903
Studio: Persea Books
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Product Description:
On the occasion of her one hundredth birthday in 2001, a new edition of Laura Riding's collected poems. Always ahead of her time, no other major poet of the last century enters the twenty-first so fresh, so essentially unexplored as does Laura Riding. Her formidable credentials as a modernist need no longer distract attention from the class-of-her-own this writer occupies. Beginning in spiritual respect for Shelley, Whitman, and Francis Thompson, Riding's resolve to work toward nothing less than 'the essence of the good in language' carries her across an entire poetic world within this volume--as it afterwards carried her out of poetry altogether. This centennial volume presents the entire content of the 1980 edition, together with the author's retrospective Introduction and Appendices, corrected and reset. The poem-text reproduces, with the few errata corrected, the typography and design of the celebrated very first edition of 1938, as supervised by the author herself. Included are the ten memorable full-page illustrations by John Aldridge.
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Rated by buyers -
I'll start by admitting that I just couldn't read the whole thing. I read the very first 40 pages of poems after starting with all the wonderful introductory material and just didn't find enough in them to keep going. I flipped through the book to read poems from different parts of the book and just kept being disappointed. There are a lot of positive reviews for this book out there, one which even compares Riding to Gluck, who might be my favorite poet. So I could be missing something. And there are some great moments. There is absolute beauty every now and then. But just not enough to keep me going for 400 pages. A "selected works" might be better. For myself, I'll stick to reading her essays.
The essays (intros, prefaces, whatever) that begin the book are brilliant. Laura Riding has a lot of very intelligent things to say about how we use language and how language is the realm in which we most closely approach truth, or at least in language we are able to complete truth.
However, keeping in mind that Riding eventually renounced poetry in order to dedicate herself more exclusively to linguistic studies, the poems seem to live in the abstract. There is a lot to be said for Riding's use of language and her ability to use diction and syntax to express things that are either incredibly specific, or remain so unattainably open that the mind must open with them and follow the poem a million directions at once. But more often than not, the poems feel like an exercise in language and nothing more. It feels like she's always playing. And her concentration specifically on language means that she is always dealing in the abstract. Her poems tend to lack structure and imagery.
I think I see the reason that Ms. Riding is remembered primarily for her essays and her work in linguistics.
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