Description

Chatwin Books, hardcover

Publication Date: October 4, 2022

Publisher Marketing:

The Collected Poems gathers every Young poem that survivespublished, unpublished, draftsfor a definitive edition that rivals the work of a university press. – Steven Moore, Poetry Foundation

This is a limited edition hardcover that is signed by the editors.

Best known for her gargantuan, elliptical novel Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, Marguerite Young began her career as a lyric poet, working almost exclusively in the form until the mid-1940s. Her monumental study of two failed 19th century utopias located in New Harmony, Indiana, Angel in the Forest, began as a collection of some sixty blank-verse sonnets, before she resorted to prose in order to incorporate more facts and figures than the poetic form would allow. Publishers Weekly would say that the book was composed with the extravagance of a poet rather than the pedantry of a historian.

While it was her next book, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling that would canonize her as one of the most daring writers of the mid-20th century, she never strayed from the mindset of a poet, telling one interviewer that “I think that in the 1,200 pages of Miss MacIntosh, every page is a poem.”

In her new and previously unpublished introduction, Young wrote that her poetry “pointed to what I would become, and there I now see the whole structure of my writing about which I may not have been wholly conscious at the time.” She goes on to say that readers who encounter her poetry “may find keys to the understanding of all my life’s work”.

Included in the volume are Youngs two poetry collections, Prismatic Ground (1937) and Moderate Fable (1944)neither of which were reprinted after their initial runsuncollected poems that appeared in magazines like Accent, The Kenyon Review, and The Saturday Review of Literature, and a trove of previously unpublished poems, including early poems dictated from memory by Marguerite herselfamong them I Heard a Bird, which opens the collection, penned at the age of nine. Work on this project, with Marguerites assistance, began in 1987. The Collected Poems of Marguerite Young. Edited by Phil Bevis, Joshua Rothes, and Jacob Siefring.