H. D. (Hilda Doolittle)

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.

Written by H. D. in 1930 and only published in a 100-copy edition for friends in 1934, Kora and Ka marked a new level of intensity in the poet's experiments with prose fiction. The two long stories contained in this volume, "Kora and Ka" and "Mira-Mare," are at once profoundly autobiographical yet, through H. D.'s unusual brand of modernist story-telling, pushed beyond personality. The men and women who haunt these tales are wraiths in spiritual exile, wanderers in a Europe still recovering from the devastations of World War I. Her descriptions of the beaches at Monte Carlo are triumphs of vivid detail - bright watercolors set against brooding psychological portraits. In its exploration of the "broken dualities" of self and civilization, Kora and Ka looks forward to H. D.'s masterpieces, Tribute to Freud and Trilogy.

"Im Ion stellt der jugendliche Platon eine Seite des historischen Sokrates dar, die in den Dialogen, die nach dessen Verurteilung und Hinrichtung verfasst sind, nicht mehr zentrales Thema ist. Platon, wie auch andere aus der jugendlichen Intelligenz Athens waren fasziniert von jenem Mann, der in Wortgefechten mit wechselnden Partnern ständig triumphiert. Ion, ein Rhapsode, glaubt in diesem Dialog zu wissen, der Beste seines Faches zu sein. Grundsätzlich nicht auf der Höhe der Diskussion wird er jedoch im Gespräch von Sokrates vorgeführt. Es zeigt sich, dass er über seine Tätigkeit nicht vernünftig Rechenschaft ablegen kann. Der Kommentar erschließt den Text für den heutigen Leser und gibt philologische, historische und thematische Erläuterungen."--Publisher's description from Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.

"Veronica, Pontius Pilate's wife, is beautiful, brilliant, and weary of her worldly life. One day she disguises herself as a servant in order to visit a fortune-teller, and when the seer, Mnevis, tells her of a Jew, a "love-god," Veronica suddenly feels alive, experiencing "sudden pre-visions of inner splendor." Jesus arouses the artist, the dreamer in her - this prophet who believes women have an important place in the spiritual hierarchy. What follows is a chain of events in which Veronica commits the one genuine act of her life, daringly offering Jesus a "way out" of his crucifixion."--BOOK JACKET.

" ... a thinly disguised roman à clef in which most of the leading members of London's Bloomsbury Group are easily identified: D.H. Lawrence, his wife Frieda, Ezra Pound, English poet Richard Adlington and, in the character of the heroine Julia Ashton, H.D. herself. The time is World War I, the setting is the London of the 1917 air raids, and the theme the disintegration of love, undermined by the distant but ubiquitous war. Julia lives for her husbands brief leaves from the front, only to discover that he has transferred his sexual interest to an earlier mistress, Bella. Into Julia's crumbling, trancelike world enters Frederick, the fiery writer whose scandalous novels on the problems of sexuality no one dares publish. Not until she finally escapes the fog and fever of London for the quiet of Cornwall can Julia discern of face the truth about Frederick, and about herself."--Back cover.

xii, 311 p. ; 25 cm

Reader includes: [Glass Menagerie]( by Tennesse Williams