Description
The first appearance of this award-winning writer's work since the 1940s, this collection, which includes an introduction by John Ashbery, restores Joan Murray's striking poetry to its originally intended form.Though John Ashbery hailed Joan Murray as a key influence on his work, Murray’s sole collection, Poems, published after her death at the early age of twenty-four and selected by W. H. Auden for inclusion in the Yale Series of Younger Poets, has been almost entirely unavailable for the better part of half a century. Poems was put together by Grant Code, a close friend of Murray’s mother, and when Murray’s papers, long thought to be lost, reappeared in 2013, it became clear that Code had exercised a heavy editorial hand. This new collection, edited by Farnoosh Fathi from Murray’s original manuscripts, restores Murray’s raw lyricism and visionary lines, while also including a good deal of previously unpublished work, as well as a selection of her exuberant letters.
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"The first appearance of this award-winning writer's work since the 1940s, this collection, which includes an introduction by John Ashbery, restores Joan Murray's striking poetry to its originally intended form. When John Ashbery hailed Joan Murray asa major influence in an essay in 2003, her sole collection Poems, had been out of print for decades. Joan Murray hit the literary scene as a bright talent in American poetry just before her death of a heart condition in 1942. She was only in her twenties. After her death, W.H. Auden selected Murray for the 1946 Yale Younger Poets Prize. As she left behind no definitive edition of her work, her Poems was compiled by Grant Code, a close friend of Murray's mother. Code heavily edited the manuscript, often streamlining Murray's raw lyricism, and left out dozens of poems. It had originally been supposed that Murray's original manuscripts had been lost, but a trove of her writings miraculously resurfaced in 2013. In Collected Poems, Farnoosh Fathi has gone through all of Murray's papers and reinstated her visionary lines, while also recovering much previously unpublished verse. An heir to W.B. Yeats, Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, and Laura Riding, Murray today, with her vatic lullabies and mythic imagination, still belongs to the future"--
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