Laura Riding is considered one of the America's greatest twentieth-century poets. Robert Nye's collection of her poems is the only selection to draw from the full range of Riding's poetic work, including from her last-published book.
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Editorial Reviews
From Library Journal
Editor Nye presents poems by modern literature's angel of devastation and Robert Graves's mad muse?poems that have come to seem more and more important to literature. Equal parts stage rhetoric and singsong, Riding's poems are like prophecies uttered by a child. Her influence can be felt not only in the work of her sometime lover Graves but in that of poets as diverse as W.H. Auden, May Swenson, and John Ashbery. The unforgettable music of the lines "The rugged black of anger/ Has an uncertain smile-border" and "The poppy edifices of sleep" prepares the reader for the brilliance of the whole poems. Nye shows Riding's intriguing work to best advantage?unlike the poet's own tendentious Selected Poems in Five Sets (Norton) of 1970?and his introductory remarks are a testament to both his friendship with her and his sound critical judgment. Highly recommended.?Graham Christian, Andover-Harvard Theological Lib., Cambridge, Mass.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
It's a pity that tales from Riding's complex life, especially her dramatic relationship with Robert Graves, have more currency than her poetry. Poet and scholar Nye seeks to redress this imbalance with this selection of the best of Riding's work, electrifying poems that combine the clean, bracing structure of traditional poetic forms with a startlingly modern sensibility. Riding's exactness and lucidity seem English in flavor and, indeed, England was her home for many years, but she was born Laura Reichenthal in New York in 1901 and died Laura Jackson in Florida in 1991 long after she gave up poetry for prose. This sequence of name changes reflects the evolution of Riding's sense of self, and it's no coincidence that the very act of naming, the most fundamental aspect of a poet's work, figures prominently in Riding's radiant poems as part of the mosaic of her thoughts on time, love, beauty, womanhood, and death. Riding was a brilliant, passionate, and influential writer whose work deserves repeated resurrections. Donna Seaman
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