The cover may have unsettled me, but the contents inspired. That women in the photograph looks a bit too masculine, I don’t know what the two metal balls are doing there and I can’t figure out the perspective. Looking at the book’s cover now, I remember that it made me uncomfortable. Looking her up, I see Louise Bernikow is still going strong, writing and talking about women (also dogs). This, and the Penguin Book of Women Poets. I’ve just had to buy another copy, as the first literally fell to pieces in my hand. But I hardly remember any of those books now ( Gaining Ground, a novel by Joan Barfoot, notable exception.) But this excellent anthology of poetry has been with me through nearly forty years reading.
I wanted books to help me build my self up. I was trying to become myself as a young adult, and that self was a woman writer and reader. And all that seemed summed in that little steam-iron logo. Virago was a women’s publisher, too, but The Women’s Press list was odder, more homemade, less corporate, more extreme. I’d go to a bookshop and look for Womens Press books then choose from amongst them, books I knew might be of interest to me. I think that was a pretty widespread view.Īh, the dear old Women’s Press. At University in the 1980’s a teacher, a man, told me that women weren’t concentrated enough for poetry. Wright (1953), to find that only 6 of the more than 90 poets included were women. Earlier this week I opened The Faber Book of C20 Verse, edited by J.Heath-Stubbs and D. That’s an easy sentence to write in 2018 but it might have been nearly impossibly fifty years ago in the year of the world’s youth revolution, 1968.
Sometime in the late seventies I bought an anthology of women’s poetry, The World Split Open, edited by Louise Bernikow, published by The Women’s Press.
0 kommentar(er)
