Mary Barnard

"Mary Barnard is a quietly eminent poet whose candor and accessibility belie her erudite poetics, evident just below the surface of her often disarming verse. Sarah Barnsley has made Barnard's lifelong work as a poet and translator available for readers to explore fully for the first time—in an edition well-informed by historical, literary, and theoretical notes that locate each poem in its context and offer insights into her poetics. As Barnard writes in 'Eavesdropper,' 'These vines have put their roots through me without / Marring the silence where the nerves / Twitch.' But with the publication of this volume, her poems' 'stirring sibilant answers' can now be 'heard / Through an open doorway.'" — John Gery, Director, Ezra Pound Center for Literature, University of New Orleans

"Barnard's poetry is lucid, precise, and full of metrical subtlety. Through careful research and thoughtful editing, Barnsley's collection of her work presents a rich portrait of a dedicated person of letters, thoroughly demonstrating 'how a poet can travel for sixty years / and still be always almost arriving.' Mary Barnard will help both students and scholars thicken and nuance their understanding of American modernism and may even serve as inspiration to aspiring poets." — Michael Leong, author of Contested Records: The Turn to Documents in Contemporary North American Poetry

"What a gift to have all of Barnard's poetry in one volume. The kind of archival recovery work Barnsley has undertaken is not only exciting and surprising but also vitally essential. With Barnard's voice now more fully available to us, we can better hear the history of conversations in literary modernism as they happened." — Alison Fraser, the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo