REDIVIVUS
Collected poetry from the little magazines
A sad fact of cultural history is that most writing is lost, and because of its short form and limited publication, this is especially true of poetry. Consequently, the output of writers once in the vanguard whose output was scattered in the little magazines of their time may end up irretrievable.
However, mass digitisation by libraries of the little magazines and limited circulation collections permits the location and transcription of this lost verse, and print-on-demand publishing makes the creation of anthologies of such verse affordable. This is the rationale behind the Redivivus anthologies.
WHITE ASHES
Gladys Oaks
Gladys Oaks was a prolific and prize-winning writer who is today generally only remembered for a single poem about desire. A complex and often contrary writer, White Ashes reprints her two short collections (China White and Nursery Rhymes for Children of Darkness), as well as all of her magazine verse.
Meeting after Five Years
What can I say to all these little schemes
Fatuous tricks, and shabby, worn-out lies
Who knew you young and whole? I scanned your dreams!
Are you so beaten that you must devise
Makeshifts to hide a failure from me — friend,
Makeshifts an aimless casual could see?
We once were poor together. In the end
Is poverty your only gift for me?
Are we now so alien you must play
The acrobat? And smiling must you throw
Your prides, like silly balls, against our day,
And whimper in your smile until I go?
And can I be so cruel, stiff and true,
Break through and love you… when my coat is new?
SONGS AFTER TRAVEL
Kathryn White Ryan
Kathryn White Ryan was a prize-winning poet whose work was so well known in the early twenties that her biography in Poetry read "She needs no introduction". She was editor of Voices, habitue of the MacDowell colony and regular contributor to Commonweal, the NY Sun and Argosy. She stopped writing in the last decade of her life and concentrated on painting. This anthology features her collection The Golden Phoenix and her collected public work.
Surrender
Helen, upon the alien balcony.
Heard shout and bugle sound alarm
And her surrendered heart was calm.
She saw round ships upon the sea,
Like fruitful women, give forth men.
Armed tumult marred the white shore then.
She only, in her world, knew peace...
Calm as a tree where wind has been,
She heard shield crash and javelin.
CONVALESCENT IN THE SOUTH
Jessie Dismorr
Jessie Dismorr was primarily a painter, and was heavily involved in the Vorticist movement. It is by that connection her work is best known. She contributed some of the most striking verse to the first issue of Blast, but owing to ill health became inactive until her writing appeared briefly in the mid 1930s before her eventual suicide. This collection gathers together such work as is available, and hopefully more will emerge in response to this issue.
The Enemy
The microbe that inhabits my body makes me sick; but it is he
that pushes me to impossible and exasperated feats of skill.
He drinks my strength, then pushes me to unwilling exploration.