Selected Poems

* Born into the Cunard shipping fortune, Nancy rebelled, spending her life fighting racism and fascism* Rebellion included romantic emancipation: affairs with writers and artists: Huxley, Tzara, Pound* Poems in experimental free verse and popular balladic forms* Founder of The Hours press, editor of Negro: An Anthology* Sandeep Parmar (University of Liverpool) featured Cunard on Radio 3's Free Thinking

Poems by a trail-blazing muse and activist of the Jazz AgeSelected Poems gathers writing from four decades of Nancy Cunard's life, some published here for the first time. The selection illuminates Cunard's transnational modernist project in full, from her early years as a coterie poet on the edges of Bloomsbury and avant-garde London, to her frontline activism during the Spanish Civil War and life-long fight against fascism in Europe and America, to her final years documented in poems written from hospitals and sanatoriums. Among the poems is Cunard's longer, psychogeographical work Parallax, published originally by the Hogarth Press, a response in part to T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Through her introduction and notes, editor Sandeep Parmar frames Cunard's complex legacy as a poet, publisher, and activist. A contribution to the wider feminist revision of modernism, this volume draws attention to Cunard's extraordinary, prismatic oeuvre, shaped by some of the twentieth century's most dramatic events.