E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

Dr Sandeep Parmar I was glad to attend the Bloomsbury launch of the Collected Poems of Hope Mirrlees , from Carcanet's Fyfield Books, last evening.  The book has been edited by British poet and scholar Sandeep Parmar , currently a Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge.  Mirrlees is the little-known modernist who wrote the splendid and astonishing poem 'Paris', published in 1919.  It anticipates many of the elements of The Waste Land , and is one of the most experimental English poems from the period.  It has recently become seen as integral to a reformation of the modernist canon. This rediscovery of Mirrlees is down to a few people, and Parmar is one of them, who have heroically worked these past few years to bring proper attention to bear on this writer.  Mirrlees has a complicated life, in that she was a lesbian who turned against her past life and became a Catholic, moving to South Africa, and writing relatively traditional verse in later years, d...