Graham Borland’s Open Access article in Notes and Queries, “Signets Reborn” offers a valuable gloss on the source of H.D.’s serpent and thistle motif that plays an important role in Tribute to Freud.
The article highlights signet rings from the catalogs of the Louvre and British Museum. Borland identifies the likely source as the Louvre catalog item Bj 1212:
The H.D. International Society will sponsor one session at the 2023 annual conference of the American Literature Association, May 25-28, 2023, at the Westin Copley Place in Boston, MA.
In the past year, both Winged Words by Donna Hollenberg and H.D. and Bryher: An Untold Love Story of Modernism by Susan McCabe have transformed the landscape of critical biographies of H.D. New Directions has reissued HERmione, and studies like Lara Vetter’s “H.D., Modernist Fiction, and a Queer Quotidian” or Zlatina Nikolova’s “Onscreen Femininity Deconstructed” are highlighting the relevance of H.D. Studies to contemporary debates about gender and sexuality. The H.D. Society looks forward to sharing your new perspectives on H.D. Studies at the ALA conference in May 2023.
Please send proposals (up to 250 words), along with a brief biography or curriculum vitae, to Celena Kusch, co-chair of the H.D. International Society) at kuschc@uscupstate.edu. Please send submissions no later than January 23, 2023.
The H.D. International Society will sponsor one session at the 2022 annual conference of the American Literature Association, May 26-29, 2022, at the Palmer House Hilton in Chicago, IL. At present, this conference is planned as a fully face-to-face event with no virtual presentations. Any updates or changes to those plans will be posted on the ALA Web site and shared with selected panelists as soon as possible.
The range of new work in H.D. studies has included new approaches to H.D.’s response to war, to the environment, to gender and sexuality, to film, to life writing, to avant-garde experimentation, to the archives–not to mention the impact of Susan McCabe’s new H.D./Bryher biography. We look forward to sharing your fresh insights at the ALA conference.
Please send proposals (up to 250 words), along with a brief biography or curriculum vitae, to Celena Kusch, co-chair of the H.D. International Society) at kuschc@uscupstate.edu. Please send submissions no later than January 23, 2022.
Jane Augustine’s edited and annotated critical edition of The Gift has been an essential reference in H.D. studies since its initial release in 1998. Now, the University Press of Florida is releasing the paperback edition–perfect for teaching centered on H.D., on autobiography, and on “the gift” of artistic creativity.
“It is a special joy to have the complete text of The Gift, a stunning work in the H.D. canon, a work of import for studies in autobiography and the essay, for understanding the spiritual crisis of modernism, and as a climactic work in the career of an extraordinary 20th-century woman writer.”
Richard Vytniorgu of the University of Leicester positions H.D. as a thinker and reads her autobiographical prose and recently published work of the 1940s in conversation with literary theorist, Louise Rosenblatt. The book, The Butterfly Hatch (Sussex, 2019), takes H.D.’s recurring imagery of butterflies as a metaphor for exploring wisdom, consciousness, and experience.
The book is a brilliant and urgent call for new interventions in both the study and teaching of literature. Vytniorgu, whose indebtedness to the theory and practice of Louise Rosenblatt is everywhere evident, promises readers greater self-knowledge and enhanced understanding of some of the central existential issues of life. The book upends most established approaches to both the study and teaching of literature, especially those that remove the person from readings of texts and ignore crucial concepts such as wisdom. The Butterfly Hatch is an indispensible work, therefore, for educators, students, and nonprofessional readers interested in learning about themselves and the world from their encounters with literature.
Elizabeth A. Flynn, Professor Emerita, Michigan Tech University
Bryher’s Beowulf: A Novel of the London Blitz was published originally in 1956 by Pantheon Press. Schaffner Press has issued a 2020 reprint of the novel with an introduction by Susan McCabe.
This gorgeous book features two women who own a local teashop in the midst of the London blitz of World War II. Founded on the everyday challenges and survival strategies, the novel transforms the old hero into Beowulf, the plaster bulldog statue that embodies the spirit of the teashop and the community it creates.
H. D. & Bryher: An Untold Love Story of Modernism (Oxford UP, 2021) digs into the rich archives of both H.D. and Bryher to offer a portrait of modernist literature, queer life, and political engagement. This comprehensive double-biography (424 pages) promises to unlock new approaches to the H.D./Bryher networks and their role in shaping and enabling modernism around the world.
“This rich and stunning biography tells the untold story of two women, Bryher and H.D., who radically shaped modernism. McCabe uncovers the emergence of their aesthetics, spirituality, sexuality, politics and more–together and apart–against the backdrop of the oppressive milieu, their international travel, and beyond.” — Cassandra Laity, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Hannah Voss of Durham University and co-editor of Postgraduate English shared her strategies for remembering the 60th anniversary of H.D.’s death on the 27th of September.
Using a guerrilla poetry strategy, Voss is making cards and stickers of ‘Oread’ along with a QR code that takes you to H.D.’s poetry foundation page. Voss is calling on the H.D. community to share the small remembrance with students, in bookstores, and on social media with #HDday.
The book is available in hardback and ebook formats.
About the book:
“Lheisa Dustin draws on Lacanian theory, Buddhist thought and feminist scholarship to offer densely argued interpretations of work by H.D. and Djuna Barnes. Focusing particularly on the two women’s challenging use of language, Ghost Words and Invisible Giants acknowledges academic and spiritual sources while suggesting fresh ways of making sense of enigmatic linguistic tendencies and patterns. This study will be of particular interest to readers in literary modernism, spirituality and psychoanalytic theory.” — Caroline Zilboorg, is the editor of Richard Aldington and H.D.: Their Lives in Letters and H.D.’s Bid Me to Live. Among her other books are Transgressions, a historical novel about H.D., and the two-volume Life of Gregory Zilboorg (Psyche, Psychology and Psychoanalysis and Mind, Medicine and Man)
In Light’s Music, Charlotte Mandel focuses on both beginnings and ends. In her grandchildren and great grandchildren, she celebrates new life and her legacy going forward, her Jewish heritage honored and preserved—all from a voice reconciling and making close getaways from the inevitable as she prepares for the day “shadows come forth” and she can “dissolve” and rise “to rose-red smoke.” This chapbook is a strong distillation of precision in poetry and hope for us all.
–Mary Francis Wagner
Charlotte Mandel’s new chapbook, Light’s Music, has been published in Delphi Volume VIII with Blue Lyra Press.