Mina Loy: Woman and Poet FROM THE PUBLISHER
Mina Loy: Woman and Poet represents the first substantial collection of criticism devoted to this long neglected major Modernist poet. Loy (1882-1966) made a career of friendship. Before World War I, she actively participated in the Futurist movement in Italy. During the war years she was a friend and associate of William Carlos Williams and other writers associated with New York Dada. In the 1920s, she was a vivid presence in the Paris literary scene. Her poems during these years were saluted by such critics as Ezra Pound, who linked her to Marianne Moore. But in the 1930s she gradually disappeared from sight, and she is the last major Modernist poet to be recovered.
SYNOPSIS
The first substantial collection of criticism devoted to this long neglected major Modernist poet.
FROM THE CRITICS
Library Journal
This set of scholarly essays is for those interested in the multivalent esperanto of modernist Mina Loy. The unflinching scholar Elisabeth Frost; Loy biographer Carolyn Burke (Becoming Modern, LJ 2/1/96); and Roger Conover, editor of a recent edition of Loy poetry, are among the many contributors who weigh in here to honor the strange and difficult metaphysical inquiry of the poet. Loy's overwriting is explored as a means of "scrutinizing the social and literary marginalization of women," and her work is examined in terms of the emerging modernist techniques of fracture and cubism. Her refusal to approach lyricism as reparation or compensation is viewed here as deliberate discontinuity. Writing such as Loy's allows for a wide variety of scholarly maneuvering, and this volume, with a massive 100-page bibliography, successfully attempts some elucidation of a difficult realm.--Scott Hightower, NYU/Gallatin, New York
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