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The TellingLaura RidingEdited by Michael Schmidt![]()
Categories: 20th Century, American, Women
Imprint: Fyfield Books Publisher: Carcanet Press Available as: Paperback (185 pages) (Pub. Jun 2005) 9781857547740 Out of Stock
Truth's nature is to fill a place that belongs to it when the place becomes cleared of a usurping occupant. It slips into place, then, with a quiet of natural fitness, perfectly not-astounding in the rightness of its being there.
(Note 4, p. 149) For Laura (Riding) Jackson, two decades of intense poetic dedication finally revealed poetry itself to be a 'usurping occupant'. It was a long time before she felt ready to publish this post-poetic testament, the book she called a 'personal evangel'. The work of a poet who renounced poetry in mid-life because it hampered the way to something further in language, The Telling stands central to her work and unique in the intellectual history of the twentieth century. The language-quality of The Telling is distinctive; so too is the author's vision of human fulfilment as attainable through truth-speaking. The core-part of the book, in 62 numbered sections, is followed by a 'Preface for a Second Reading', and in turn by the confiding 'Some After-Speaking: Private Words'. This concentric series of extending considerations - linguistic, literary, social, spiritual - completes the book, while leaving its thought open to further exploration. Michael Schmidt considers this rich and rewarding work in his introduction.
Awards won by Michael Schmidt
Winner, 2016 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem - Sasha Dugdale's 'Joy', published in PN Review 227 (PN Review 227 )
Praise for Michael Schmidt
'Its pleasures are longer term ones: as you return to it and re-read its substantial selections, you come to appreciate how and what each contributor is working on.'
Jane Routh, The North 66 '...this is the joy of New Poetries VIII: time and again you discover refreshing and compelling new styles and subjects' Jake Morris-Campbell, The Poetry School '...probably the most informative and entertaining poetry journal in the English-speaking world.' John Ashbery 'The most engaged, challenging and serious-minded of all the UK's poetry magazines.' Simon Armitage 'It has attempted to take poetry out of the backwaters of intellectual life and to find in it again the crucial index of cultural health.' Cairns Craig, Times Literary Supplement |
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