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Collected Poems and Selected Prose (2e)

Charlotte Mew

Edited by Val Warner

Cover Picture of Collected Poems and Selected Prose
Categories: 19th Century, 20th Century, Women
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Edition: 2nd
Publisher: Carcanet Press
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  •   I remember rooms that have had their part
    In the steady slowing down of the heart:
    The room in Paris, the room at Geneva,
    The little damp room with the seaweed smell,
    And that ceaseless maddening sound of the tide -
    Rooms where for good or ill - things died.

    (from 'Rooms')



    Charlotte Mew (1869-1928) was admired by writers as diverse as Siegfried Sassoon, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf and Dylan Thomas; Thomas Hardy called her 'the best living woman poet'. For decades after her suicide she was known only by a few anthology pieces. Now she is again widely recognised as a true original. Her writing has an urgency and passion that compel her to re-invent forms and prosodies to explore her complex pains and loves.

    This collection reveals the full range of her work. She can be appreciated as a bravely experimental modernist, a poet of formal precision whose themes are at the heart of feminist concerns.

    Val Warner's introduction provides background to Mew's life, shared with her painter sister, caring for their mother, concealing the mental illness of her brother and her other sister and her own ambivalent sexual nature. From such constraints she created powerful poetry.
    Table of Contents

    Contents







    Introduction



    A Note on the Text



    Editions and Further Reading







    Poems

    The Farmer's Bride (1916)

    The Farmer's Bride

    Fame

    The Narrow Door

    The Féte

    Beside the Bed

    In Nunhead Cemetery

    The Pedlar

    Pécheresse

    The Changeling

    Ken

    A quoi bon dire

    The Quiet House

    On the Asylum Road

    Jour des Morts (Cimetiére Montparnasse)

    The Forest Road

    Madeleine in Church

    Exspecto Resurrectionem



    Additional poems included

    In The Farmer's Bride , 1921 edition

    On the Road to the Sea

    The Sunlit House

    The Shade-Catchers

    Le sacré-Coeur (Montmartre)

    Song

    Saturday Market

    Arracombe Wood

    Sea Love

    The Road to Kérity

    I Have Been Through the Gates

    The Cenotaph

    The Rambling Sailor (1929)

    In the Fields

    From a Window

    Not for that City

    Rooms

    Monsieur qui passé (Quai Voltaire)

    Do Dreams Lie Deeper?

    Domus Caedet Arborem

    Fin de féte

    Again

    Epitaph

    Friend, Wherefore -?

    I so liked Spring

    Here lies a Prisoner

    May, 1915

    June, 1915

    Ne me tangito

    Old Shepherd's Prayer

    My Heart is Lame

    On Youth Struck Down

    The trees are Down

    Smile, Death

    The Rambling Sailor

    The Call

    Absence

    To a Child in Death

    Moorland Night



    Early poems printed at the end

    Of The Rambling Sailor

    At the Convent Gate

    Requiescat

    The Little Portress (St Gilda de Rhuys)

    Afternoon Tea

    She was a Sinner

    Song



    Poems collected or published posthumously

    An Ending

    A Question

    Left Behind

    A Farewell

    'There shall be no night there (In the Fields)

    V.R.I.

    To a Little Child in Death

    Péri en mer (Camaret)



    Selected Prose

    Stories

    Elinor

    The Minnow Fishers

    The Wheat

    Essay

    An Old Servant

    Play

    The China Bowl

    Charlotte Mew
        Charlotte Mew was born in London in 1869, the third child of an architect, and was educated at a girl's school in London. Her first published work was a short story in The Yellow Book in 1894. In May 1912 Mew was introduced to May Sinclair, a leading novelist who ... read more
    Val Warner
    VAL WARNER read Modern History at Oxford and has worked as a teacher, freelance copy-editor and freelance writer. She was Creative Writing Fellow at the University College of Swansea and Writer in Residence at the University of Dundee. She has received a Gregory Award. Her Carcanet publications include the pamphlet These ... read more
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