New and Selected Poems of Anna Wickham

Book excerpt: Anna Wickham (1883-1947) was one of the most important female poets writing in English during the first half of the twentieth century. A pioneer of Modernist poetry, she was also a fierce feminist, social activist, and friend of many significant writers, including D.H. Lawrence, George Bernard Shaw, Dylan Thomas, Katherine Mansfield, Natalie Clifford Barney, Kate O'Brien, and Lawrence Durrell. She produced a daring and influential body of work while living an often tragic life, which ended with her suicide. Wickham's unconventional life provided her with a unique worldview; she drew heavily on her own experiences in her poetry while interrogating conceptions of gender roles, marriage, motherhood, sexuality, and class. While Wickham's poetry earned her a major reputation during her lifetime, and her most famous poems continue to be anthologized, most of her published work is out of print and the majority of her poems have never been published. New and Selected Poems of Anna Wickham is the first collection of Wickham's poetry to be published in over three decades. This collection republishes one hundred of Wickham's poems selected from the collections published during her lifetime, as well as poems from Selected Poems (1971) and The Writings of Anna Wickham (1984). In addition to bringing many of Wickham's greatest poems back into print, this collection publishes one hundred and fifty of her remarkable poems for the first time, significantly expanding her body of published work and demonstrating her significant poetic achievement. *** "The publication of Anna Wickham's 'New and Selected Poems' is a landmark event for poets and readers and will allow us to properly celebrate this vocational, passionate and important voice for the first time." -- Carol Ann Duffy (Series: UWAP Poetry) [Subject: Poetry]