Customer Reviews

Trilogy

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Poems of angels and gems and fragrance and stars, all written on the downward slope of WWII. H.D. praises the life that survives, the mythic returns of Amen-Ra and Christ, which is also the first budding of spring. London joins in these poems with Karnak and St. John's second city, Paradise--a resurrection of "our earth before Adam," that "grain or seed/opened like a flower." Angels and Magi bring their usual good news, but the last word belongs to Mary Magdalene and the goddesses behind her, shifting from Isis to Venus to H.D. herself. The thick web of allusions reads at times like a parody of Modernist excess, but the impulse behind them (and these were written quickly, after a long dry spell) is more inspired than erudite. H.D. improvised a religion of her own that enfolded the War like a shell, tranforming its destruction to a promise of new life. "Trilogy" is a quiet testament to her faith in writing as redemption, the poet as witness and priest.

H.D.'s "Trilogy" was written about the same time as Eliot's "Four Quartets."

It's a shame H.D.'s war-poem/philosopy-poem isn't as well known as Eliot's.

Eliot deals with time and timelessness--or the eternal within time--and while his verse is very seductive and beautifully interweaves the abstract and the concrete, it merely points to sublimity, never really reaches it.

H.D.'s "Trilogy," really reaches it. There are many many epiphanies made concrete, and her very simple but shattering verse actually takes you to them.

This is a marvelously fluent poem. Yes, there are allusions, but they are simple and bonus, rather than essential.

It is one of those poems that is quite clear immediately, yet repays reading after reading.

It's a pity so few current poets write with such depth and breadth--to say nothing of such passion.

This is one of the classics of the 20th century; it is her most beautiful and mature work.

It is unfortunate that H. D.'s Trilogy is not better known. As the title suggests, it is a set of three related works; there are three long poems, each 43 sections long, each emphasizing different but interrelated themes. The first, "The Walls Do Not Fall," explores and evokes Hermetic images and interweaves them with Christian symbols in what seems to be an attempt to synthesize a fresh metanarrative. The second, "Tribute to the Angels," is woven around the names of seven angels, each of which suggests a different aspect of divinity, as well as of the human soul. The third, "The Flowering of the Rod," is largely taken up with an imagined encounter between Mary Magdalene and Kaspar (one of the Magi), from whom Mary receives the perfume with which she anoints Jesus.

Trilogy builds a new worldview in which binary concepts (time/eternity, concrete/abstract, male/female) interact positively rather than violently, and as one might expect, poetry is at the center of the project. H. D. is eclectic in her use of images and symbols, drawing from Christian, Greek, and Egyptian sources primarily. (Her use of Christian imagery is bracingly unorthodox, but without being aggressively anti-Christian.) She loves wordplay, and her stanzas are full of evocative images. Despite its being a war poem, Trilogy is remarkably affirmative in its aspirations to goodness, beauty, and meaning.

The style will not appeal to everyone. The whole poem is written in 2-line, unrhymed stanzas of varying length (generally 4-8 syllables), with lots of puns and some internal rhyme. The poem employs many allusions, but most will be understood by anyone familiar with the Bible and Greek mythology. One of the great strengths of this poem is its layered meanings. It may be legitimately read on a number of different levels: as a spiritual/religious work, as a feminist document, as a war poem, as a psychoanalytic project, and as an ars poetica, to name a few. This poem will appeal to anyone who has a taste for Modernist poetry along the lines of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, although H. D. is not quite so obscure as some of her contemporaries. Like all long poems, Trilogy has its dry passages, but overall the poetry is sound.

This edition is well-edited by Aliki Barnstone, who provides a responsible, accessible introduction to the work as well as illuminating end-notes that explain many of H. D.'s allusions. In her introduction, Barnstone states that she has tried not to be too "interpretive" in her notes, and in that she succeeds. Once or twice I found myself wishing she would be a little more interpretive, but she is to be congratulated for not forcing the reader to see the poem only through the editor's eyes.