“Signets Reborn: H.D.’s Serpent-and-Thistle Signet Ring and Louvre Museum Item Number BJ 1212” by Graham Borland identifies the source of H.D.’s Signets imagery

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:

© 2006 RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre) / Hervé Lewandowski
Share

The Gift by H.D.: The Complete Text Now Available in Paperback

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.

book cover The Gift by H.D.

“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.”

Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Temple University
Share

The Butterfly Hatch: Literary Experience in the Quest for Wisdom, Uncanonically Seating H.D.

book cover Butterfly Hatch by Richard VytniorguRichard 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
Share

Bryher’s Beowulf Reprint Available through Edelweiss

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.

book cover Beowulf: Novel of the London Blitz by Bryher

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.

Look for a preview of Susan McCabe’s introduction online.

Share

Susan McCabe Publishes the First Double Critical Biography of H.D. and Bryher

book cover H.D. & Bryher: An Untold Love Story of ModernismH. 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

Pre-order from www.oup.com/academic with promo code AAFLYG6 to save 30 %.

Share

Lheisa Dustin publishes Ghost Words and Invisible Giants on H.D. and Djuna Barnes

book cover Ghost Words and Invisible Giants: H.D., Djuna Barnes, and the Language of Suffering

Focused on H.D.’s late writing in The Sword Went out to Sea and Helen in Egypt, Lheisa Dustin takes a psychoanalytic approach to what she calls the “language of suffering.” Dustin’s book is Ghost Worlds and Invisible Giants: H.D., Djuna Barnes, and the Language of Suffering (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2021).

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)

Share

Charlotte Mandel Publishes “Light’s Music” with Blue Lyra Press

book cover of Delphi Volume VIII, poetry collection by Carly Sachs, Lois Marie Harrod, and Charlotte Mandel. Art image is a representation of a woman viewed from behind walking through a print of flowers and leaves.

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.

Share

Jane Augustine Publishes High Desert

Published by Dos Madres Press, Jane Augustine’s High Desert (2019) shares with H.D. a sense of the living landscape and an attention to the underlying connections between disparate spaces, experiences, and even times. As Mary Mackey notes, ” In High Desert, Jane Augustine brings us vast stretches of wilderness, richly textured images, political awareness, and the transformative power of paying close attention to ordinary objects. The range of the poems in this collection is all-encompassing, stretching from an intense, almost mystical, contemplation of the angled shadow of a deck rail to Syrian bombings, tsunamis, Suzuki roshi, and the Kaliyuga.”

This gorgeous collection not only evokes H.D., but also pays tribute to her in specific poems.

Share

Lara Vetter’s A Curious Peril Out in Paperback

photo of book cover of A Curious Peril featuring an image of H.D. in a wide-brimmed hat seated at a table taken during the period of her late prose

Lara Vetter’s A Curious Peril: H.D.’s Late Modernist Prose (2017) is a Choice Outstanding Academic Title, and now it is available in paperback. The book provides both a political and intellectual context for H.D.’s late prose that extends far beyond H.D. and makes the work an excellent anchor for any course on late modernism, literature and WWII, or literature and war in general.

from the University Press of Florida Web page:
“Vetter’s book stands as an important corrective to accounts of H.D. as ethereal and disconnected. She shows, carefully and persuasively, that H.D.’s engagement with politics was not merely the interest of a woman who happened to live through some seismic shifts in political and national history, but that H.D. was engaged to the extent of the imaginative construction of possible social and political futures.”—Review of English Studies

Share