Eleanor Perry

"Why is the poetic mode of elegy so often understood as the domain of white, wealthy male poets? What possibilities and limitations exist for rethinking the ways in which we construct an elegiac tradition? Through close examination of the rigid hierarchies and binaries that pervade the elegiac canon as it is traditionally understood, this book explores these possibilities in order to examine whose work tends to be excluded from the discourse and why. Through in-depth close readings of elegies by Black women, trans* women, and non-binary writers, this book foregrounds forms of poetic knowledge and poetic practices that trouble - or work against - the ideals, values, standards and forms of knowledge embodied by the 'English' elegy so often privileged within canonical tradition. In doing so, it offers a challenge to the ways in which we currently read elegy, unearthing possibilities for revising our understanding of the elegiac tradition."--

This reissue of the classic Trilogy, by H.D. (Hilda Doolittle, 1886-1961), now includes a new introduction and a large section of referential notes for readers and students, compiled by Professor Aliki Barnstone. As civilian war poetry (written under the shattering impact of World War II), Trilogy's three long poems rank with T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets and Ezra Pound's Pisan Cantos. The first book of the Trilogy, published in the midst of the "fifty thousand incidents" of the London blitz, maintains the hope that though "we have no map;/ possibly we will reach haven,/heaven." Tribute to the Angels describes new life springing from the ruins, and finally, in The Flowering of the Rod - with its epigram, "... pause to give/ thanks that we rise again from death and live" - faith in love and resurrection is realized in lyric and strongly Biblical imagery.