Modernist Women Poets

Starred review from April 28, 2014
Reintroducing the early 20th century through the poetry of 16 women—some famous, some nearly unknown—coeditors Hass (a former U.S. Poet Laureate) and Ebenkamp have produced that rare, valuable thing: a volume that could be at once a resource for educators, and a fine entrée for the general reader. Composed between the 1910s and the 1940s, modernist poetry rejected older forms for stranger, harsher shapes; its free verse, prose blocks, or intricate stanzas attuned to new technology, or to free love, or to big cities, or to modern war. The great women of modernism—Gertrude Stein, H. D., Marianne Moore—are hardly news, but they are rarely encountered together in such concentration. Big excerpts from Stein let her shine, both as an absurdist and as a poet of sexy intimacy. H.D. appears not only as Imagist, or miniaturist, but as the author of an expansive masque and a visionary poem (“The Walls Do Not Fall”) about WWII. Moore, Mina Loy, and Laura Riding get appropriate recognition, and even sophisticates can still make discoveries here, among them Lola Ridge and Hazel Hall. Hass’s substantial afterword doubles as a terrific introduction to modernism in general; the poet C. D. Wright contributes a briefer foreword, and well-chosen prose concludes the whole.