Collected Poems: With Notes Toward the Memoirs - Softcover

Barnes, Djuna

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0299212343 ISBN 13: 9780299212346

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005

Synopsis

This groundbreaking edition compiles many of the late unpublished works of American writer Djuna Barnes (1892?1982). Because she published only seven poems and a play during the last forty years of her life, scholars believed Barnes wrote almost nothing during this period. But at the time of her death her apartment was filled with multiple drafts of unpublished poetry and notes toward her memoirs, both included here for the first time. Best known for her tragic lesbian novel Nightwood, Barnes has always been considered a crucial modernist. Her later poetry will only enhance this reputation as it shows her remarkable evolution from a competent young writer to a deeply intellectual poet in the metaphysical tradition. With the full force of her biting wit and dramatic flair, Barnes’s autobiographical notes describe the expatriate scene in Paris during the 1920s, including her interactions with James Joyce and Gertrude Stein and her intimate recollections of T. S. Eliot. These memoirs provide a rare opportunity to experience the intense personality of this complex and fascinating poet.

About this title

About the Author

Phillip Herring is professor emeritus of English at the University of Wisconsin?Madison and now lives in Austin, Texas. He is the author of the biography Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes. Osías Stutman, poet, immunologist, and professor emeritus at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, has published a Spanish translation of Barnes’s poetry, which was on the bestseller list in Spain, where he now lives. His poems have been published in a variety of books and magazines.

From Publishers Weekly

Famous for her grim lesbian novel Nightwood (1936) and for her life as a fabulous expatriate in Paris between WWI and WWII, Barnes (1892– 1982) has never enjoyed a reputation as a poet, partly because almost none of her post-Nightwood verse saw print. This diligent and exhaustive edition both restores her hard-to-find magazine verse of the 1910s and 1920s and makes available her dense, sardonic late poems. The early poems are conventional in form, but extreme in emotion. Some focus on same-sex desire; others perform a self-conscious wildness, with disturbing or deadly tableaux—a lady's "profile like a dagger lain/ Between the hair," a "snail that marks the girth of night with slime." The later poetry, as the editors write, "challenges us to savor lines that appear to be English, but... elude us," condensing almost to unintelligibility a gothic-sarcastic sensibility derived from T.S. Eliot, and from the 17th-century dramatists Barnes, like Eliot, admired. She casts herself as a neo-medieval scourge of hypocrisy named Dan Corbeau ("Lord Crow"), attacks authority of all sorts, or invokes "Lucifer, the salmon of the air,/ The kiss killing man," who "Breeds himself by falling from the air." Often the editors print multiple drafts of a single unfinished poem. Of more general interest, perhaps, are the pages from Barnes's unfinished prose memoir of Paris: despite their repetitive, fragmentary state, they contain witty remarks and observations on Joyce, Stein, Jean Cocteau and other luminaries, among them her own mentor T.S. Eliot, whom she admired and resented to the end. (Jan.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0299212343
• ISBN 13: 9780299212346
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 306
• Editor: Herring Phillip, Stutman Osias