Selected Poems: Hilda Doolittle

HD (Hilda Doolittle) is now acknowledged as a major Modernist, of the company of Eliot and Pound, Joyce and Lawrence. Selected Poems celebrates her achievement, starting with the Imagist period, including the 'lost' poems of the 1930s in which she discovered her mature voice, the prophetic Trilogy poems of the war years, and concluding with extracts from the late, visionary Helen in Egypt and Hermetic Definition, her most distinctive writing. Like Yeats, she did not go stale but grew old with changing words, new passions and renewing wisdom. In the end she focuses on ecstasy, rebirth and the re-formation of the divided self. In his introduction Louis L. Martz of Yale University, who edited HD's Collected Poems 1912-1944, suggests that she could not be appreciated or properly heard until 'the essential struggle' of recent years, the feminist enterprise, had changed our way of reading poetry. The struggle in HD's poetry prefigures these vital changes. Carcanet publish HD's Trilogy, Tribute to Freud and Hermetic Definition.