Drafts, Fragments, And Poems

Product Description

When John Ashbery hailed Joan Murray as a major influence in an essay in 2003, her sole collection Poems, had been out of print for decades. Joan Murray hit the literary scene as a bright talent in American poetry just before her death of a heart condition in 1942. She was only in her twenties. After her death, W.H. Auden selected Murray for the 1946 Yale Younger Poets Prize. As she left behind no definitive edition of her work, her Poems was compiled by Grant Code, a close friend of Murray's mother. Code heavily edited the manuscript, often streamlining Murray's raw lyricism, and left out dozens of poems. It had originally been supposed that Murray's original manuscripts had been lost, but a trove of her writings miraculously resurfaced in 2013. In Collected Poems, Farnoosh Fathi has gone through all of Murray's papers and reinstated her visionary lines, while also recovering much previously unpublished verse. An heir to W.B. Yeats, Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, and Laura Riding, Murray today, with her vatic lullabies and mythic imagination, still belongs to the future.When John Ashbery hailed Joan Murray as a major influence in an essay in 2003, her sole collection Poems, had been out of print for decades. Joan Murray hit the literary scene as a bright talent in American poetry just before her death of a heart condition in 1942. She was only in her twenties. After her death, W.H. Auden selected Murray for the 1946 Yale Younger Poets Prize. As she left behind no definitive edition of her work, her Poems was compiled by Grant Code, a close friend of Murray's mother. Code heavily edited the manuscript, often streamlining Murray's raw lyricism, and left out dozens of poems. It had originally been supposed that Murray's original manuscripts had been lost, but a trove of her writings miraculously resurfaced in 2013. In Collected Poems, Farnoosh Fathi has gone through all of Murray's papers and reinstated her visionary lines, while also recovering much previously unpublished verse. An heir to W.B. Yeats, Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, and Laura Riding, Murray today, with her vatic lullabies and mythic imagination, still belongs to the future.
Joan Murray (1917-1942) was born during an air raid in London. She was the daughter of Stanley Webster Murray, a painter and illustrator, and Florence Margaret Murray, a diseuse. She spent her early years in London, Paris, and Ontario, and lived most of her short life in the United States, where she studied dance and theater, and poetry with W. H. Auden at the New School. She suffered from rheumatic fever as a child, the complications of which led to a chronic heart condition and eventually to her death.

John Ashbery is the author of several books of poetry, including Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. His first collection, Some Trees (1956), was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series. He has also published art criticism, plays, and a novel. From 1990 until 2008 Ashbery was the Charles P. Stevenson, Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College. His most recent collection of poems, Commotion of the Birds, was published in October 2016.

Farnoosh Fathi is the author of the poetry collection Great Guns and founder of the Young Artists Language & Devotion Alliance (YALDA). She teaches at the Stanford Pre-Collegiate Summer Institutes and lives in New York.