Paris - by Hope Mirrlees (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"Obscure, indecent and brilliant." -- Virginia Woolf

Modernism's lost masterpiece.

Paris: A Poem is a daring and dynamic experimental long poem written by the British writer Hope Mirrlees. Set on a single day in post-first world war Paris, this ambitious piece of modernist psychogeography brings alive the city's underground railways and grand boulevards by means of playful typography, collage and fragmentation. This celebratory centenary edition reproduces the original design of the very first, which was published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press in 1920. It features an introductory foreword by Deborah Levy, an afterword by Mirrlees's biographer Sandeep Parmar, as well as commentary by Julia Briggs who spotlighted Paris as 'modernism's lost masterpiece'.

Review Quotes

"Obscure, indecent and brilliant." -- Virginia Woolf

"While Hope Mirrlees is remembered as a fine and remarkable novelist, it has been forgotten that, in Paris, she wrote a modernist poem that anticipated and prefigured Eliot's The Waste Land. It is wonderful to see it back in print again, for scholars and lovers of poetry alike." -- Neil Gaiman