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The H.D. Book

by Robert Duncan (Author), Michael Boughn (Editor), Victor Coleman (Editor), Michael Boughn (Introduction by), Victor Coleman (Introduction by)
Paperback eBook
Price: $36.95 / £31.00
Publication Date: Jan 2011
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 696
ISBN: 9780520948020
Series:
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About the Book

This magisterial work long awaited and long the subject of passionate speculation is an unprecedented exploration of modern poetry and poetics by one of America’s most acclaimed and influential postwar poets. What began in 1959 as a simple homage to the modernist poet H.D. developed into an expansive and unique quest to arrive at a poetics that would fuel Duncan’s great work in the 1970s. A meditation on both the roots of modernism and its manifestation in the work of H.D. Ezra Pound D.H. Lawrence William Carlos Williams Edith Sitwell and many others Duncan’s wide-ranging book is especially notable for its illumination of the role women played in creation of literary modernism. Until now The H.D. Book existed only in mostly out-of-print little magazines in which its chapters first appeared. Now for the first time published in its entirety as its author intended this monumental work—at once an encyclopedia of modernism a reinterpretation of its key players and texts and a record of Duncan’s quest toward a new poetics—is at last complete and available to a wide audience.

About the Author

Robert Duncan (1919–1988) was born in Oakland and spent most of his life in California. One of the major figures in the San Francisco Renaissance, Duncan, often identified with Donald Allen's landmark anthology The New American Poetry and the Black Mountain poets, is author of The Opening of the Field, Roots and Branches, and Bending the Bow, among other works.
Michael Boughn is a poet, scholar, and fiction writer. His many publications include H.D.: A Bibliography, 1905–1990, Dislocations in Crystal, Into the World of the Dead, and 22 Skidoo/SubTractions.
Victor Coleman was a founding editor of Coach House Press and is author of one / eye / love, Light Verse, and ICON TACT among many other books of poetry.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction

Book One: Beginnings

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3 Eros
Chapter 4 Palimpsest
Chapter 5 Occult Matters
Chapter 6 Rites of Participation

Book Two: Nights and Days

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11

Appendix 1: Preliminary Notes Toward Book 3 of The H.D. Book
Appendix 2: Composition and Publication History of The H.D. Book
Appendix 3: A List of Works Cited by Robert Duncan in The H.D. Book

Credits
Index

Reviews

“Published as the first volume in California's Collected Writings of Robert Duncan series, this lovingly prepared volume presents this long critical work, written in 1960 and 1961, in its full form for the first time.”
— Publishers Weekly
“The guiding light throughout is Duncan’s clear, though subtly resonant prose, which lets even lengthy sentences carry the reader smoothly along from beginning to end. For bringing this major work out of its own obscurity, full credit is due to the editors of The H.D. Book, who compiled and sometimes collated the disparate drafts and previously published versions of Duncan’s endlessly expanding, and hence necessarily unfinished, project. Thanks to their painstaking work, these scattered elements have been now integrated into a whole of sufficient fixity to permit the next phase of their ongoing elaboration—in readers’ minds.”
— Foreword Reviews
“I am besotted with a new book that is also an old book. This is The H.D. Book, by Robert Duncan, a wild, dazzling, idiosyncratic magnum opus. . . . The wonders of The H.D. Book are almost without number. [It is] a work of exacting and extravagant optimism.”
— New Republic
“Profoundly coherent: a strikingly original and provocative articulation of an American literary vision that is engaged simultaneously with Romantic enchantment, modernist formalism, and an arguably postmodern concern with citational networks, self-displacement, and the shadow play of a language always larger than us.”
— Bookforum
“Charming.”
— Poetry Foundation/ Harriet
“Extraordinary book.”
— Tri-Quarterly Online
“Into this eldritch tapestry Duncan weaves patches of poetic autobiography, strands of family history and reflections on his intellectual development.”
— The Nation
“A monumental Duncan work, long anticipated.”
— Beat Scene Magazine
“Robert Duncan’s The H.D. Book, complete in print at last, now manifests the timeliness of its permanence. Centering on the work of Hilda Doolittle and her part in the invention of modernist poetry, it embraces an assay of modernist practice and tradition as well as a searching investigation of fundamental issues in poetics, with elements of literary autobiography and cultural history and salient reference to depth psychology, cultural anthropology, political economy, art history, philosophy, and religion.”
— The Threepenny Rev
“The belated publication of The H.D. Book will, one hopes, lead more readers to her haunting, resonant later work and also convince more readers to make the leap into Robert Duncan's demanding but gorgeous word-music. Someday, some century even, he and his peers in the Bay Area Renaissance . . . will be recognized as the greatest and most rewarding American poets of their era.”
— Bookslut