Born near Manchester in 1948, Anna Mendelssohn authored poetry,
fiction, drama, and life writing; she was also a visual artist,
musician, and translator. From 1971 to 1977 she served time at
Holloway Prison in London due to her involvement in extreme leftist
activism. From the early 1980s, Mendelssohn composed nineteen
poetry collections and published in journals receptive to her
experimental, charged lyrics, among them, Parataxis, Critical
Quarterly, and Jacket. Her work appeared in seminal anthologies
including Denise Riley's Poets on Writing (1992), Iain Sinclair's
Conductors of Chaos (1996), and Rod Mengham and John Kinsella's
Vanishing Points: New Modernist Poems (2004). Often situated within
the British Poetry Revival, Mendelssohn retained a marginal, if
constant, presence in the poetry community in Cambridge, England,
where she lived from 1983 until her death in 2009. In 2010, her
vast archive of writings and drawings was generously donated by her
three children to Special Collections at the University of Sussex.
Labelled surrealist and ludic, Mendelssohn's poems draw
thematically and stylistically on an expansive lineage that
encompasses an international array of post-1850 avant-garde figures
such as Charles Baudelaire, Gertrude Stein, Anna Ahkmatova, Nazim
Hikmet, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Tom Raworth. Closely attuned to
the fraught legacy of the female vanguard writer, as well as to
disparities of class and race, her poems are impassioned, acute,
probing, allusive, and unparalleled. Part aesthetic treatise ("a
poem is not going to give precise directions"); part antipolitical
manifesto ("the war is too close / for revolution to be
understood"); part lament ("softly the sound of woe / gallops");
part celebration of the possibilities of poetic noise and
possibility, replete with "scoopydoo sounds", "night[s of] pouring
gold", and "high walk[s] into fantasy", Mendelssohn's writing
resolutely resists containment or category. This scholarly edition
is the first replete collection of the poems Anna Mendelssohn
published or prepared for circulation in her lifetime, often
writing under the name Grace Lake.
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