First Awakenings: The Early Poems of Laura Riding [Hardcover]

Laura (Riding) Jackson (Author), Elizabeth Friedmann (Contributor)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1992

Poems written from 1920-1926, never before collected.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

These are poems from a lost cache of Riding's works, written between 1920 and 1926 but rejected by the author for inclusion in her first book. Recovered only in 1979, here they are grouped with a selection of her poems published in the same years in magazines like the Fugitive but uncollected in any of her previous books. So this is the early work of an important poet, one who could conjure the musicality of thought and fit the eccentric orbits of ideas into the taut logic of her verse. However, much of the previously unpublished verse is flawed; one has a sense of Riding's astonishing ear instructing itself ("The Magicians," "Jazz Jubilate"). But in poems like "Tact," "If a Woman Should Be Messiah," "Presences," "Can Lips Be Laid Aside?" and "I Had Such Purposes," we find her working in a finished and original idiom; there is nothing dated about about it. The work collected from magazines amounts to one-fifth of the book. These poems are more polished, and the influence of Emily Dickinson--her love of abstraction, and the flutelike beauty of her lines--has been more nearly absorbed. Though this collection is far too long, still there is much to be thankful for: "You will grieve for me, life. / You will grow dim and unaware / And there will be no other messenger / To bring you tidings of yourself, / Some wistful testimony that you are at all."
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Riding's demanding, idiosyncratic poems influenced some of this century's most notable writers (W. H. Auden was an admirer), but she renounced poetry at the peak of her success because she found it to be an inadequate medium for the expression of truth. This volume (the companion to her Collected Poems of Laura Riding , Persea Bks., 1980) contains recently discovered--and mostly unpublished--material written when Riding was in her early twenties. Her ear for unusual rhythmic effects, combined with a precociously cynical view of human relationships, results in ambitious poems that are dazzling in their technical virtuosity and strangely world-weary. The poet, whose "heart is a cold crisp cinder," frequently takes as her theme love's failure, how men and women, "moving in separate dark," are only "faintly aware how love travels . . ./ back and forth across a fen of misunderstanding." Riding's intellectually vigorous poems deserve to be read alongside those of her better-known modernist contemporaries. Recommended for comprehensive literature collections.
- Christine Stenstrom, Shea and Gould Law Lib., New York
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 280 pages
• Publisher: Persea Books (September 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0892551798
• ISBN-13: 978-0892551798
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #936,761 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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