Selected Poems

The Selected Poems of Nancy Cunard brings together published and previously unpublished poems written across four decades. From her early years as a coterie poet on the edges of Bloomsbury and avant-garde London, to her frontline activism in the Spanish Civil War, the fight against fascism and racism in Europe and America, to her late life precariously spent in sanatoriums and hospitals, this selection brings Cunard’s transnational modernist project to light through her experimental, passionate writing. Expanded to include much of her early lyrical work and comprehensive, with textual notes and a critical biographical introduction, this edition offers a rare insight into a poet’s wider oeuvre produced around some of the twentieth century’s most dramatic events. It includes Cunard’s long, psychogeophical poem, Parallax, published originally by the Hogarth Press and a response in part to Eliot’s The Waste Land. An international modernist poet, publisher and activist, Cunard’s legacy has until now largely been linked to her fortune as shipping heiress or artist’s muse. These poems are a document of the modernist era, its flux and its energy.

Nancy Clara Cunard (10 March 1896 ? 17 March 1965) was a writer, heiress and political activist. She was born into the British upper class and devoted much of her life to fighting racism and fascism. She became a muse to some of the 20th century’s most distinguished writers and artists, including Aldous Huxley and Ezra Pound, who were among her lovers. She suffered from mental illness in later life and died aged 69 in the Hopital Cochin, Paris. Sandeep Parmar received her PhD from University College London. She has written extensively on the unpublished autobiographies of the modernist poet Mina Loy. She also edited Paris by Hope Mirrlees (Carcanet) and published a poetry collection, The Marble Orchard.