Collected Poems

"Hope Mirrlees (1887-1978) has been regarded as a lost modernist. Her extraordinary long poem 'Paris,' written in 1919, is a journey through a day in post First World War Paris. It was considered by Virginia Woolf 'obscure, indecent, and brilliant.' Read today, the poem retains its exhilarating daring. Mirrlees's experimentalism anticipates 'The waste land'; her writing is integral to the twentieth-century canon. And yet, after 'Paris,' Mirrlees published no more poetry for almost half a century, and her later poems appear to have little in common with the avant-garde spirit of 'Paris'. In this first edition to gather the full span of Mirrlees's poetry, Sandeep Parmar explores the paradoxes of Mirrlees's development as a poet and the complexities of her life." --