Böcker av Hilda Doolittle

H.D.'s Nights is about one woman's attempt to get to the essence of her bisexuality and failed marriage through an illicit heterosexual affair--an attempt that eventually ends in suicide. Much like a mystery novel, we are given the clues to the writer Natalia Saunderson's death: a muff and watch left beside a frozen pond and two parallel skating lines that meet. Following her drowning, Natalia's manuscripts, a kind of experimental diary, are delivered to a publisher friend, and they provide the details which lay bare the often painful story.

In recapturing her memories of being a very little girl in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and later on a country place outside Philadelphia, H.D. "let the story tell itself or the child tell it." It is this voice or child's-eye view that lends The Gift its special charm as H.D. recreates the ordinary and extraordinary occasions of her early youth, the nightmares and delights. A road-company presentation of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Christmas Eve with its particular family ritual, a family outing, a disturbing accident--the happenings and incidents, perceptions and misconceptions with which a child's life is crowded are the substance of this most winning book. As she did for the H.D. novel HERmione, H.D.'s daughter, Perdita Schaffner, provides a fine introduction.

Written by H. D. in 1930 and only published in a 100-copy edition for friends in 1934, Kora and Ka marked a new level of intensity in the poet's experiments with prose fiction. The two long stories contained in this volume, Kora and Ka and Mira-Mare, are at once profoundly autobiographical yet, through H. D.'s unusual brand of modernist story-telling, pushed beyond personality. The men and women who haunt these tales are wraiths in spiritual exile, wanderers in a Europe still recovering from the devastations of World War I. Her descriptions of the beaches at Monte Carlo are triumphs of vivid detail - bright watercolors set against brooding psychological portraits. In its exploration of the broken dualities of self and civilization, Kora and Ka looks forward to H. D.'s masterpieces, Tribute to Freud and Trilogy.

Vale Ave - Latin for "Farewell, Hail" - is a hymn to Eros that unfolds as a gorgeous palimpsest of eternal recurrence and reincarnation, charting the course of two lovers who each seek the other across cultures, myths, and centuries. Vale Ave is alchemical - "mystery and portent, yes, but at the same time," as H. D. writes, "there is Resurrection and the hope of Paradise."

H. D.'s (Hilda Doolittle, 1884-1961) late poems of search and longing represent the mature achievement of a poet who has come increasingly to be recognized as one of the most important of her generation. The title poem and other long pieces in this collection ("Sagesse" and "Winter Love") were written between 1957 and her death four years later, and are heretofore unpublished, except in fragments. We can see now in proper context her fine ear for the free line, and understand why other poets, such as Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan, find so much to admire in H. D.'s work. As in her earlier books, one level of H.D.'s significant poetic statement derives from her intimate knowledge of and identification with classical Greek and arcane cultures; taken together, these elements make up the poet's own personal myth. Norman Holmes Pearson, H. D's friend and literary executor, has contributed an illuminating foreword to this impressive collection.H. D.'s (Hilda Doolittle, 1884-1961) late poems of search and longing represent the mature achievement of a poet who has come increasingly to be recognized as one of the most important of her generation. The title poem and other long pieces in this collection ("Sagesse" and "Winter Love") were written between 1957 and her death four years later, and are heretofore unpublished, except in fragments. We can see now in proper context her fine ear for the free line, and understand why other poets, such as Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan, find so much to admire in H. D.'s work. As in her earlier books, one level of H.D.'s significant poetic statement derives from her intimate knowledge of and identification with classical Greek and arcane cultures; taken together, these elements make up the poet's own personal myth. Norman Holmes Pearson, H. D's friend and literary executor, has contributed an illuminating foreword to this impressive collection.

"Like every major artist she challenges the readers intellect and imagination."--Boston Herald