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

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Cynthia Hogue Publishes “On being ‘ill’-informed: H.D.’s late modernist poetics (of) d’espère” in Jacket2

H.D. at Yale Sept 1956 with Norman Holmes Pearson and Bryher in front of Sterling Library. Image from Beinecke Library Digital Collections. H.D. Papers.Cynthia Hogue’s poet’s essay, “On being ‘ill’-informed: H.D.’s late modernist poetics (of) d’espère,” appears in Jacket2, July 9, 2018.

This essay spans H.D.’s poetry and prose, from Trilogy and By Avon River to The Sword Went Out to Sea, Helen in EgyptVale AveHirslanden Notebooks, and Hermetic Definition. Hogue combines disability studies and feminist poetics to explore the later years of H.D.’s career.

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Michael Bough’s Beautiful New Poetry Collection Inspired by H.D.’s Hermetic Definitions

Michael Boughn’s new poetry collection, Hermetic Divagations – After H.D. (Swimmers Group, 2017) embraces the poetic method of H.D.’s Hermetic Definitions to arrive at a wholly new reflection on the many questions H.D. posed about war, love, spirituality, and survival–questions that retain their relevance for us today. Michael Boughn is the author of several books of poetry, including Cosmogrophia: A Post-Lucretian Faux Micro Epic (2010), which was nominated for the Governor General Award.

“Michael Boughn’s Hermetic Divagations is a luminous book of gratitude and persistence. Boughn weaves H.D.’s traditions, motifs and words in his own poised lines, examining a resonant image hoard—flame, angel, amber, lotus, worm, and owl, and thereupon continually re-discovering female figures emanating poise, eros and blessing amid confusion and depredation. “Then she is there” is a repeated realization. The work is at once a poetics of rumination evoking immanent presence and a meditation on the acts of war and rancor that harass grace.  Hermetic Divagations is a serious and lucid reworking of questions of civilization where “dung and myrrh // mingle with air and fear,” yet where one persists in seeking the “hidden entrance in a world // of restricted visibility.” – Rachel Blau DuPlessis

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H.D., Embroidery, and Modernism

Embroidery detail from The Space Between Scalar media archive, image credit from the Schaeffner Family

Image Detail from Amy Elkins’s article in The Space Between

Two recent articles focus on H.D.’s contributions to the visual arts through her elaborate embroidery projects.

Elizabeth Anderson’s “H.D.’s Tapestry: Embroidery, William Morris, and The Sword Went Out to Sea” appears in Modernist Cultures, vol. 12, no. 2 (2017). Linking H.D.’s tapestry work both to her spiritualism and to her inspiration in the Pre-Raphaelites, Anderson explores H.D.’s use of tapestry in her late novel The Sword Went Out to Sea.
Amy E. Elkins of Macalester College published “A Stitch in Time: H.D.’s Craft Modernism as Transhistoric Repair” in The Space Between: Literature and Culture 1914-1945, vol. 12, no. 6 (2016). Elkins’s abstract notes that her “essay presents, for the first time, an archive of H.D.’s needlework and demonstrates its relationship to her literary craft.” The essay is filled with rich images of H.D.’s embroidery, and Elkins links that work to psychological strategies of coping and survival in the wake of World War I.
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The Spirit of Revolt Women Writers Archives and the Cold War Modernism/Modernity Print Plus

Raised fist with the caption Persist serves as the title image for the Mind the Gap! Cluster on modernism and feminism at Modernism/modernity's Print Plus platformThis month’s Modernism/modernity Print Plus platform features “Mind the Gap! Modernism and Feminist Praxis.” Articles by Madelyn Detloff, Anne Fernald, Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, and Ewa Ziarek take up the issue from a range of perspectives. Kennedy-Epstein’s “The Spirit of Revolt: Women Writers, Archives and the Cold War” begins with a curricular debate about the role and literary heft of H.D. in modernist studies today. Her defense of H.D. and other modernist women writers is wide-ranging and offers a compelling argument for ensuring that women writers feature prominently in the literary landscape.

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University Press of Florida Releases Lara Vetter’s A Curious Peril

book cover of A Curious Peril, by Lara Vetter. Image features H.D. in a large straw hat on a patio with bistro chairs, probably in Monte Carlo.Lara Vetter’s fascinating treatment of H.D.’s late prose in the political context of post-World War II has been released by UP Florida. Miranda Hickman notes that Vetter’s book demonstrates how H.D.’s late prose contributes to “politically attuned cultural work” and that Vetter “astutely counters longstanding claims about H.D.’s escapism.”

Find Lara Vetter’s A Curious Peril here: http://upf.com/book.asp?id=9780813054568

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New book by Lara Vetter, A Curious Peril: H.D.’s Late Modernist Prose

The University Press of Florida has just published Lara Vetter’s new book, A Curious Peril: H.D.’s Late Modernist Prose. The monograph offers readings of a range of H.D.’s post-World War II writing: The Sword Went Out to Sea, By Avon River, White Rose and the Red, The Mystery, Magic Mirror, Compassionate Friendship, and End to Torment, with briefer discussion of Thorn Thicket, the Hirslanden Notebooks, and, from earlier in H.D.’s career, The Moment and Palimpsest. It also includes a chronology of H.D.’s writing from this period and an appendix mapping works that H.D. owned or read that inform Vetter’s discussion.

 

Here is the link to the publisher: http://upf.com/book.asp?id=9780813054568

 

 

 

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Modernist Women Writers and Spirituality: A Piercing Darkness edited collection now available

Book Cover for Modernist Women Writers and Spirituality, featuring a glowing moon in a cloudy sky. The edited collection Modernist Women Writers
and Spirituality: A Piercing Darkness
, edited by Elizabeth Anderson, Andrew Radford, and Heather Walton, has been released by Palgrave (January 2017). Contributions by Suzanne Hobson and Matte Robinson focus on H.D., alongside chapters devoted to a range of other modernist women writers, including Mary Butts, Jane Harrison, Dora Marsden, and many more.

Order the book or individual chapters at http://www.palgrave.com/de/book/9781137530356

 

 

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