First published 1990
This comprehensive collection brings together all surviving poems by Marguerite Young, the author who would later write the massive novel Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. The volume includes her two original poetry books, Prismatic Ground from 1937 and Moderate Fable from 1944, both long out of print since their first editions. Readers will also discover uncollected poems that appeared in literary magazines such as Accent, The Kenyon Review, and The Saturday Review of Literature, plus a wealth of previously unpublished work. The collection opens with "I Heard a Bird," a poem Young composed at nine years old and later dictated from memory. Young worked primarily as a lyric poet until the mid-1940s, when she turned to prose for her historical study Angel in the Forest, which began as sixty blank-verse sonnets about failed utopian communities in New Harmony, Indiana. In a previously unpublished introduction, Young explains that her poetry contains the structural blueprint for all her later writing and offers readers essential keys to understanding her complete body of work.
Genres: 20th-century, american, poetry, biography-memoir
Vibes: atmospheric, emotional, lyrical
Tropes: intimate, thought-provoking
Period: 20th-Century
Paperback · Arundel Pr