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Selected Poems

Nancy Cunard

Edited by Sandeep Parmar

Cunard Selected Poems
10% off eBook (EPUB)
Series: Fyfield Books
Categories: 20th Century, British, Women
Imprint: Fyfield Books
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (304 pages)
(Pub. Oct 2016)
9781784102364
£12.99 £11.69
eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE!
(Pub. Oct 2016)
9781784102371
£10.39 £9.35
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  • Description
  • Author
  • Reviews
  • Selected Poems gathers writing from four decades of  Nancy Cunard’s life, some published here for the first time. The selection illuminates Cunard’s transnational modernist project in full, from her early years as a coterie poet on the edges of Bloomsbury and avant-garde London, to her frontline activism during the Spanish Civil War and life-long fight against fascism in Europe and America, to her final years documented in poems written from hospitals and sanatoriums. Among the poems is Cunard’s longer, psychogeographical work Parallax, published originally by the Hogarth Press, a response in part to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.  Through her introduction and notes, editor Sandeep Parmar frames Cunard’s complex legacy as a poet, publisher, and activist. A contribution to the wider feminist revision of modernism, this volume draws attention to Cunard’s extraordinary, prismatic oeuvre, shaped by some of the twentieth century’s most dramatic events.
    Nancy Cunard
    Nancy Clara Cunard (10 March 1896 – 17 March 1965) was a writer, heiress and political activist. She was born into the British upper class and devoted much of her life to fighting racism and fascism. She became a muse to some of the 20th century's most distinguished writers and artists, ... read more
    Sandeep Parmar
    Sandeep Parmar received her PhD in English Literature from University College London in 2008 and her MA in Creative Writing from UEA. She has written extensively on the unpublished autobiographies of the modernist poet Mina Loy. She is currently writing the modernist poet Hope Mirrlees’s biography and editing her out-of-print novels ... read more
    'There is plenty in the life to distract from the work, and recent efforts to bring her poetry back into view have suffered from disproportionate interest in her lovers, her money, her attire, her social status and the reverse Cinderella-arc of her fame and fortune. This new volume, which includes a substantial number of previously unpublished poems, gives her poetry the chance to free itself from the legend. It comes with an introduction by the editor, Sandeep Parmar, that is judicious and gossip-free; her clear-eyed advocacy situates Cunard's forty-odd years of work in its busy cultural and political contexts.'
    Patrick McGuinness, London Review of Books


    'This important collection showcases the formal and thematic diversity of Cunard's work, and illuminates an extraordinary body of work which passionately documents the crucial episodes of the twentieth century.'
    The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society (UCL Press)


    'A bold heroine of the battle against the inexpressible.' - Ramón J. Sender

    'The vermilion wall / receding as a sin / beyond your moonstone whiteness, / Your chiffon voice.' - Mina Loy



    'One of the major phenomena of history.' - William Carlos Williams


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