HERmione [Paperback]

This autobiographical novel by the Imagist poet H. D. (18861961) is a rare and hallucinatory treasure. In writingThe famously radical portrait of an artists life by one of the most celebrated poets of the last century She showed a way to penetrate mystery; which means, not to flood the darkness with light so that darkness is destroyed, but to enter into darkness, mystery, so that it is experienced. The work of an imagination that incorporates boldly the modern consciousness and aesthetic and the traditional, psychoanalytic realism and hermetic visionary experience of a passionate life in its old age. H.D. renders the past with hallucinogenic distortion, in pulsing poetic prose. This is a coming-of-age narrative told at a slant, in which people harden into marble statues, and curtains extend for miles in blue diagonals. In some ways, As Francesca Wade writes in her excellent afterword, included in New Directions recent reissue, the novel, as a piece of early autofiction, is H.D.s reckoning, her search for a voice as she rails against the labels and strictures of a world that fails to understand her. I am not an imagist, nor wife, nor daughter, nor muse, Having H.D.s work at its best has the peculiar power of evanescing the contingent into something shimmering, a continual allegory in Keatss sense, both immanent and renewable. Hers is a poetry close to ritual invocation, resistant to the one-damn-thing-after-another offered by conventional biography. As Susan Howe wrote, in a tribute to H.D. on the centennial of her birth, ecstasy is outside time.' This welcome new edition underscores the importance of the novels initial rediscovery and signals that its time for