LGBTQ+ Studies

Chosen Poems is also, Lorde says, "a linguistic and emotional tour through the conflicts, fears, and hopes of the worlds I have inhabited." Among those worlds are such earlier books as The First Cities, Cables to Rage, From a Land Where Other People Live, New York Head Shop and Museum, and Coal. "Only the worlds of Africa scrutinized in The Black Unicorn, too complex for excerpt, have been excluded." The volume also includes seven new poems. As Adrienne Rich has written, Lorde, "for the complexity of her vision, for her moral courage and the catalytic passion of her language, has already become, for many, an indispensable poet." Chosen Poems will provide for Lorde's readers, both old and new, another proof of this continuing truth.

As Malcolm Cowley says in his introduction, the first edition of Leaves of Grass 'might be called the buried masterpiece of American writing', for it exhibits 'Whitman at his best, Whitman at his freshest in vision and boldest in language, Whitman transformed by a new experience.' Mr Cowley has taken the first edition from its narrow circulation among scholars, faithfully edited it, added his own introduction and Whitman's original introduction (which never appeared in any other edition during Whitman's life), and returned it to the common readership to whom the great poet really speaks.

These hundred poems and fragments constitute virtually all of Sappho that survives and effectively bring to life the woman whom the Greeks consider to be their greatest lyric poet. Mary Barnard's translations are lean, incisive, direct: the best ever published. She has rendered the beloved poet's verses, long the bane of translators, more authentically than anyone else in English.

Born in Pennsylvania in 1886, Hilda Doolittle moved to London in 1911 in the footsteps of her friend and one-time fiancé Ezra Pound. Indeed it was Pound, acting as the London scout for Poetry magazine, who helped her begin her extraordinary career, penning the words "H. D., Imagiste" to a group of six poems and sending them on to editor Harriet Monroe in Chicago. The Collected Poems traces the continual expansion of H. D.'s work from her early imagistic mode to the prophetic style of her "hidden" years in the 1930s, climaxing in the broader, mature accomplishment of Trilogy.