"My bat-like thought-wings would beat painfully in that sudden searchlight," H.D. writes in Tribute to Freud, her moving memoir. Compelled by historical as well as personal crises, H.D. underwent therapy with Freud during 1933-34, as the streets of Vienna were littered with tokens dropped like confetti on the city stating "Hitler gives work," "Hitler gives bread." Having endured World War I, she was now gathering her resources to face the cataclysm she knew was approaching. The first part of the book, "Writing on the Wall," was composed some ten years after H.D.'s stay in Vienna; the second part, "Advent," is a journal she kept during her analysis. Revealed here in the poet's crystal shard-like words and in Freud's own letters (which comprise an appendix) is a remarkably tender and human portrait of the legendary Doctor in the twilight of his life. Time double backs on itself, mingling past, present, and future in a visionary weave of dream, memory, and reflections.

Of special significance are the "Uncollected and Unpublished Poems (1912-1944)," the third section of the book, written mainly in the 1930s, during H. D.'s supposed "fallow" period. As these pages reveal, she was in fact writing a great deal of important poetry at the time, although publishing only a small part of it. The later, wartime poems in this section form an essential prologue to her magnificent Trilogy (1944), the fourth and culminating part of this book. Born in Pennsylvania in 1886, Hilda Doolittle moved to London in 1911 in the footsteps of her friend and one-time fiancé Ezra Pound. Indeed it was Pound, acting as the London scout for Poetry magazine, who helped her begin her extraordinary career, penning the words "H. D., Imagiste" to a group of six poems and sending them on to editor Harriet Monroe in Chicago. The Collected Poems 1912-1944 traces the continual expansion of H. D.'s work from her early imagistic mode to the prophetic style of her "hidden" years in the 1930s, climaxing in the broader, mature accomplishment of Trilogy. The book is edited by Professor Louis L. Martz of Yale, who supplies valuable textual notes and an introductory essay that relates the significance of H. D.'s life to her equally remarkable literary achievement.

Vale Ave - Latin for "Farewell, Hail" - is a hymn to Eros that unfolds as a gorgeous palimpsest of eternal recurrence and reincarnation, charting the course of two lovers who each seek the other across cultures, myths, and centuries. Vale Ave is alchemical - "mystery and portent, yes, but at the same time," as H. D. writes, "there is Resurrection and the hope of Paradise."

The fabulous beauty of Helen of Troy is legendary. But some say that Helen was never in Troy, that she had been conveyed by Zeus to Egypt, and that Greeks and Trojans alike fought for an illusion. A fifty-line fragment by the poet Stesichorus of Sicily (c. 640-555 B.C.), what survives of his Pallinode, tells us almost all we know of this other Helen, and from it H. D. wove her book-length poem. Yet Helen in Egypt is not a simple retelling of the Egyptian legend but a recreation of the many myths surrounding Helen, Paris, Achilles, Theseus, and other figures of Greek tradition, fused with the mysteries of Egyptian hermeticism.

This boxed set of the first twelve collections in the New Directions Poetry Pamphlet series contains:

Osama Alomar's Fullbood Arabian H. D.'s Vale Ave Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Blast Cries Laughter Forrest Gander's Eiko & Koma Oliverio Girondo's Poems to Read on a Streetcar Susan Howe's Sorting Facts, or 19 Ways of Looking at Chris Marker Sylvia Legris's Pneumatic Antiphonal Bernadette Mayer's The Helens of Troy, New York Dunya Mikhail's 15 Iraqi Poets Alejandra Pizarnik's A Musical Hell Nathaniel Tarn's The Beautiful Contradictions Lydia Davis & Eliot Weinberger's Two American Scenes

"DESTROY," H.D. had pencilled across the title page of this autobiographical novel. Although the manuscript survived, it has remained unpublished since its completion in the 1920s. Regarded by many as one of the major poets of the modernist period, H.D. created in "Asphodel" a remarkable and readable experimental prose text, which in its manipulation of technique and voice can stand with the works of Joyce, Woolf, and Stein; in its frank exploration of lesbian desire, pregnancy and motherhood, artistic independence for women, and female experience during wartime, H.D.'s novel stands alone.
A sequel to the author's "HERmione, ""Asphodel" takes the reader into the bohemian drawing rooms of pre-World War I London and Paris, a milieu populated by such thinly disguised versions of Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington, May Sinclair, Brigit Patmore, and Margaret Cravens; on the other side of what H.D. calls "the chasm," the novel documents the war's devastating effect on the men and women who considered themselves guardians of beauty. Against this riven backdrop, "Asphodel" plays out the story of Hermione Gart, a young American newly arrived in Europe and testing for the first time the limits of her sexual and artistic identities. Following Hermione through the frustrations of a literary world dominated by men, the failures of an attempted lesbian relationship and a marriage riddled with infidelity, the birth of an illegitimate child, and, finally, happiness with a female companion, "Asphodel "describes with moving lyricism and striking candor the emergence of a young and gifted woman from her self-exile.
Editor Robert Spoo's introduction carefully places "Asphodel" in the context of H.D.'s life and work. In an appendix featuring capsule biographies of the real figures behind the novel's fictional characters, Spoo provides keys to this "roman a clef."

This is a new release of the original 1956 edition.

This is a new release of the original 1956 edition.

It was easy enough to bend them to my wish, it was easy enough to alter them with a touch, but you adrift on the great sea, how shall I call you back?

The world is yet unspoiled for you, you wait, expectant-- you are like the children who haunt your own steps for chance bits--a comb that may have slipped, a gold tassle, unravelled.

With Unpublished Letters By Freud To The Author.

With Unpublished Letters By Freud To The Author.

The world is yet unspoiled for you, you wait, expectant-- you are like the children who haunt your own steps for chance bits--a comb that may have slipped, a gold tassle, unravelled.

The world is yet unspoiled for you, you wait, expectant-- you are like the children who haunt your own steps for chance bits--a comb that may have slipped, a gold tassle, unravelled.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

With Unpublished Letters By Freud To The Author.

It was easy enough to bend them to my wish, it was easy enough to alter them with a touch, but you adrift on the great sea, how shall I call you back?