Selected Poems

Selected Poems gathers writing from four decades of Nancy Cunard's life, some published here for the first time. The selection illuminates Cunard's transnational modernist project in full, from her early years as a coterie poet on the edges of Bloomsbury and avant-garde London, to her frontline activism during the Spanish Civil War and life-long fight against fascism in Europe and America, to her final years documented in poems written from hospitals and sanatoriums. Among the poems is Cunard's longer, psychogeographical work Parallax, published originally by the Hogarth Press, a response in part to T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Through her introduction and notes, editor Sandeep Parmar frames Cunard's complex legacy as a poet, publisher, and activist. A contribution to the wider feminist revision of modernism, this volume draws attention to Cunard's extraordinary, prismatic oeuvre, shaped by some of the twentieth century's most dramatic events.