The Poems of Charlotte Mew

"I so liked Spring last year, because you were here." Charlotte Mew (1869-1928) is one of the strangest and most piercing voices in English poetry - admired by Thomas Hardy, who thought her the best woman poet of her time, and by Virginia Woolf and Walter de la Mare. She published only a slender body of work, yet its intensity of feeling and restless, unruled music set her apart from every school. This volume gathers her complete public-domain verse in one book: The Farmer's Bride (1916, here in its expanded 1921 edition) and the posthumous The Rambling Sailor (1929) - sixty poems of longing, faith and doubt, the dead and the dispossessed, among them "The Farmer's Bride," "The Quiet House," "Madeleine in Church," "Rooms," "The Trees are Down," and "Not for that City." Shadowed all her life by poverty and loss, Mew wrote of them with a dramatic force and tenderness unlike anyone before or since. A newly typeset Northlume Library edition, every poem on its own page, behind an original mixed-media cover illustration by JVB Atelier Designs.