Love As Love, Death As Death

Laura Riding is one of the great twentieth-century poets, but her poems have, until very recently, been little explored and understood. Love as Love, Death as Death (1928), her second collection, was composed after her move from New York to England in 1926, in the course of what was initially an intense love affair and remained a long-lasting literary partnership with Robert Graves. In the opening poem of her first book, The Close Chaplet (1926), Riding had declared her intention to shun the ‘well-tilled ground’ of lyric poetry in order to reveal her unprecedented vision of the origins of the universe and, crucially, of the role of woman—which are epic themes. The title of this second collection indicates that here, by contrast she is tackling just those most frequented themes of lyrical poetry—Love and Death—directly, afresh, and without poetic frills. With this new book Trent Editions completes a set of three very rare volumes of Riding’s poetry, each one with a substantial introduction exploring the meaning of the poems, the other volumes being The Close Chaplet and Riding’s penultimate and apocalyptic collection of 1933, Poet: A Lying Word.