Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
The most comprehensive collection of writing by award-winning US poet, renowned translator of Sappho, and trailblazing archivist Mary Barnard.
Born in the Pacific Northwest, Mary Barnard (1909–2001) struck up correspondence with Ezra Pound in 1933, won Poetry magazine's prestigious Levinson Award in 1935, and moved to New York City the following year. There she met Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams, who proclaimed her writing emblematic of "what we have been about all these years." This fully annotated volume makes available Barnard's complete poems for the first time, along with a robust selection of her translations and prose. Most well-known for her bestselling Sappho and her influential role as the inaugural poetry curator at the University at Buffalo, Barnard was a "second-wave" modernist and "late" Imagist whose regionally grounded writing also anticipated later eco-poetry. The volume's editor, Barnard scholar and biographer Sarah Barnsley, situates Barnard's work within these broader literary and cultural currents. Previously unpublished poems appear alongside Barnard's essays on her creative practice and friendships, illuminating the career, oeuvre, and ethos of this pivotal yet still underappreciated twentieth-century figure. With a foreword by Mary de Rachewiltz (author of Ezra Pound, Father and Teacher) and afterword by Barnard's literary executor Elizabeth J. Bell, Mary Barnard is essential reading for poets, scholars, and translators.
"Mary Barnard is a quietly eminent poet whose candor and accessibility belie her erudite poetics, evident just below the surface of her often disarming verse. Sarah Barnsley has made Barnard's lifelong work as a poet and translator available for readers to explore fully for the first time—in an edition well-informed by historical, literary, and theoretical notes that locate each poem in its context and offer insights into her poetics. As Barnard writes in 'Eavesdropper,' 'These vines have put their roots through me without / Marring the silence where the nerves / Twitch.' But with the publication of this volume, her poems' 'stirring sibilant answers' can now be 'heard / Through an open doorway.'" — John Gery, Director, Ezra Pound Center for Literature, University of New Orleans
"Barnard's poetry is lucid, precise, and full of metrical subtlety. Through careful research and thoughtful editing, Barnsley's collection of her work presents a rich portrait of a dedicated person of letters, thoroughly demonstrating 'how a poet can travel for sixty years / and still be always almost arriving.' Mary Barnard will help both students and scholars thicken and nuance their understanding of American modernism and may even serve as inspiration to aspiring poets." — Michael Leong, author of Contested Records: The Turn to Documents in Contemporary North American Poetry
"What a gift to have all of Barnard's poetry in one volume. The kind of archival recovery work Barnsley has undertaken is not only exciting and surprising but also vitally essential. With Barnard's voice now more fully available to us, we can better hear the history of conversations in literary modernism as they happened." — Alison Fraser, the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo
List of Illustrations and Facsimiles
Acknowledgments
Foreword: Mary Barnard—American Imagist
Mary de Rachewiltz
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Sarah Barnsley
Notes on the Text of This Edition
I. POEMS
Cool Country (1940)
The Rapids
Logging Trestle
Highway Bridge
Cool Country
Shoreline
Provincial
Roots
Planks
Prometheus Loved Us
Blood Ritual
The Axe
Playroom
Storm
Cassandra
Winter Evening
Wine Ship
Lethe
Chanson Pathetique
Lai
Adversity and the Generations
Drama
To a Lie-Adept
Provincial II
The Tears of Princesses
In Praise of Potted Plants
Hot Broth
The Orchard Spring
Fable from the Cayoosh Country
Remarks on Poetry and the Physical World
Suggested Miracle
Note to a Neapolitan
A Few Poems (1952)
Beds
The Fitting
Dick
Height Is the Distance Down
The Whisperer
Persephone
Fable of the Ant and the Word
Anadyomene
Encounter in Buffalo
Inheritance
Midnight
The Field
from Collected Poems (1979)
Ondine
The Pleiades
They Are Excited
The Spring
Noon Hour
The Solitary
Probably Nobody
Seedlings
Eternal She
Fawn
Journey
Letter from Byzantium
A Picture of the Moon
Picture Window
The Pump
Real Estate
The River Under Different Lights
Two Visits
Time and the White Tigress (1986)
PROLOGUE
FIRST FYTTE — The Year into Halves
SECOND FYTTE — The Year into Quarters
THIRD FYTTE — Time Slips a Cog
FOURTH FYTTE — The Sun in the Well
FIFTH FYTTE — Time Standing Still
SIXTH FYTTE — Song for the Northern Quarter
SEVENTH FYTTE — The Mating Serpents
EIGHTH FYTTE — The Jars
NINTH FYTTE — La Donna
TENTH FYTTE — Song for the Millenium
CODA — Song for the New Year
NOTES
from Nantucket Genesis: The Tale of My Tribe (1988)
The Ten Generations
A Note on the Name Barnard
Introduction
The Narrative
I. Before Nantucket
II. Nantucket
III. After Nantucket
Uncollected
"I found my grief..."
Thirst
Thinking of Yeats
The Carver
Impassioned Sonnet
The Pathetic Fallacy
An Evening by the Sea
Against Lethe
Aquarelle
Bay Beach
Cream
Cupbearer
"Fire, snow, and the night..."
Knight-Errant
Moonstone
Shriek of Defiance
"... Without whose untender criticism this book..."
Gourmand Before an Oyster Can
"My mind is a hall where walk..."
Sonnet for Dorothy
Estuary
Alms
Bay Road
Inspiration
Raimon the Singer
Reverdie
Uninspired to the Uninspiring
"A cloud comes down..."
For a Collection of Suburbiana
Letter from the Country
Fable
Drama
Beyond Medusa
Cat
Dormitory
Lament from the Shores of the Boorzh-wah Zee
Lyonesse Sub Mare
Study
Trefoil
"Waiting for a waning moon to rise..."
Of Possession
The Colored Stone
Cold Heaven
Curly Locks
Eavesdropper
Epicure
Mechanism
North Window
Point of Departure
The Silk Leaf
Tourist
Without Benefit of Tragedy
Ursus Parnassius
"The slenderly poised clean shaft of your fir..."
Altitude
Road to Xanadu
Fire
Convalescence
The Accounting
Crossroads
Preacher
Travel Notes
On Arriving
A Dedication
Poems Inspired by Sappho
The Fool's Serenade
"In the bridal..." (four fragments)
Love Poem
Blanchefleur
Fatigue 244
"Tranquil and shallow, spread across the flat stones..."
Commerce
Departure
Mask
A Defense of the Poet's Method
Later: Four Fragments
Ceremony
Chronos
Late Roman
Now
The Rock of Levkas
Soft Chains
Static
II. TRANSLATIONS
from Sappho: A New Translation (1958)
1. "Tell everyone..."
37. "You know the place: then..."
53. "With his venom..."
61. "Pain penetrates..."
100. "I have no complaint..."
Other Translations
Adonis Dying
Book 1 from Homer, The Iliad
The First Chorus from Oedipus King, from Sophocles, Oedipus Rex
Odysseus Speaking
Three Translations from the Greek
III. SELECTED PROSE
Confessional (1932)
Creed (1932)
A Note on Poetry (1940)
A Communication on Greek Metric, Ezra Pound, and Sappho (1978/79; 1994)
Meeting Marianne (1982)
Ezra Pound, Sappho, and My Assault on Mount Helicon (1983)
William Carlos Williams and the Poetry Archive at Buffalo (1983)
Further Notes on Metric (1994)
Editor's Notes on the Text
Afterword
Elizabeth J. Bell
Index of Titles and First Lines