In poetry’s eternal return, we might imagine Laura Riding as the child of Gertrude Stein and William Blake, figures of radical resistance to a normative (patriarchal) poetics, eschewing both empirical observations of a knowable world and the interior meditations of a searching self. Awkwardly dissonant and often mysteriously opaque, Riding’s poems are restless experiments, in which language is a genderless force, refuting ordinary epistemologies of meaning. Nearly a century after they were written, the poems in The Close Chaplet (1926) offer contemporary readers a raw encounter with the elemental quid as it seeks to capture ‘new surprise and spirit.
Ann Lauterbach
The Close Chaplet contains Laura Riding’s early poems about being a woman and being a poet, topics that anticipated second and third wave feminist writing. Here we see the fierce intelligence and linguistic precision that attracted disciples. Mark Jacobs provides an insightful introduction to Riding’s ideas and career.
Joyce Wexler
Here in The Close Chaplet, in “To No Reply,” the poet wonders about audience, which at the time was made of men, primarily. She doesn’t need their “Reply.” This is about her, a going “Out to the spot where vision should arrive” and what she has to say there. “To slip a word in,” she says, “Were to make a mouth,” and her words “break / The patent silence.” We today can make a wide audience. Reread this book.
Logan Esdale
I…derived considerable courage from Laura Riding’s self-determination, and the proof this collection gives that those who refuse compromise or write what the public thinks it wants are not obliged to back
down. Laura Riding is very brave.
Marianne Moore
No North American or European poet of this century has created a body of work that reflects more deeply on the inherent conflicts between truth-telling and the inevitable artifice of poetry than Laura (Riding) Jackson.
Charles Bernstein
... as the words and their rhythms worked upon me and then within me, I found in due course that here were not so much spells as acts of verbal disenchantment, inspired unravellings of the world's riddle.
Robert Nye
Laura Riding was one of the most important English-speaking poets of the 20th century. In Jack Blackmore and Mark Jacobs her work has found the ideal editors and commentators. Thanks to their efforts ... Riding's unique worth now becomes clear.
John Lucas
Praise for Previous Work
Riding believed poetry had to become anti-social, not commodified, answering to itself, in order to be faithful to its calling: truth-telling.
Benjamin Hollander, The Brooklyn Rail