Laura Riding's demanding, idiosyncratic poems influenced some of this century's most notable writers (W. H. Auden was an admirer), but she renounced poetry at the peak of her success because she found it to be an inadequate medium for the expression of truth.
This volume (the companion to her Collected Poems of Laura Riding , Persea Bks., 1980) contains recently discovered--and mostly unpublished--material written when Riding was in her early twenties.
Her ear for unusual rhythmic effects, combined with a precociously cynical view of human relationships, results in ambitious poems that are dazzling in their technical virtuosity and strangely world-weary.
The poet, whose "heart is a cold crisp cinder," frequently takes as her theme love's failure, how men and women, "moving in separate dark," are only "faintly aware how love travels . . ./ back and forth across a fen of misunderstanding."
Riding's intellectually vigorous poems deserve to be read alongside those of her better-known modernist contemporaries.
This review was published in Library Journal.