Description
Book SynopsisA meditation on both the roots of modernism and its manifestation in the work of H D, Ezra Pound, D H Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, Edith Sitwell, and many others. It is especially notable for its illumination of the role women played in creation of literary modernism.
Trade Review"Published as the first volume in California's Collected Writings of Robert Duncan series, this lovingly prepared volume presents this long critical work, written in 1960 and 1961, in its full form for the first time." Publishers Weekly "The guiding light throughout is Duncan's clear, though subtly resonant prose, which lets even lengthy sentences carry the reader smoothly along from beginning to end." Foreword Reviews "I am besotted with a new book that is also an old book. This is The H.D. Book, by Robert Duncan, a wild, dazzling, idiosyncratic magnum opus... The wonders of The H.D. Book are almost without number. [It is] a work of exacting and extravagant optimism." -- Jed Perl New Republic "Profoundly coherent: a strikingly original and provocative articulation of an American literary vision that is engaged simultaneously with Romantic enchantment, modernist formalism, and an arguably postmodern concern with citational networks, self-displacement, and the shadow play of a language always larger than us." Bookforum "Extraordinary book." Tri-Quarterly Online "Into this eldritch tapestry Duncan weaves patches of poetic autobiography, strands of family history and reflections on his intellectual development." The Nation "Charming." Poetry Foundation/ Harriet "Robert Duncan's The H.D. Book, complete in print at last, now manifests the timeliness of its permanence." -- Jim Powell The Threepenny Rev "The belated publication of The H.D. Book will, one hopes, lead more readers to her haunting, resonant later work and also convince more readers to make the leap into Robert Duncan's demanding but gorgeous word-music. Someday, some century even, he and his peers in the Bay Area Renaissance ... will be recognized as the greatest and most rewarding American poets of their era." -- Greer Mansfield Bookslut
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction Book One: Beginnings Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Eros Chapter 4 Palimpsest Chapter 5 Occult Matters Chapter 6 Rites of Participation Book Two: Nights and Days Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Appendix 1: Preliminary Notes Toward Book 3 of The H.D. Book Appendix 2: Composition and Publication History of The H.D. Book Appendix 3: A List of Works Cited by Robert Duncan in The H.D. Book Credits Index
