 First edition | |
| Author | Mary Gilmore |
|---|---|
| Country | Australia |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Poetry collections |
| Publisher | Angus and Robertson |
Publication date | 1939 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 181 pp |
| Preceded by | Under the Wilgas |
| Followed by | Pro Patria and Other Poems |
Battlefields (1939) is a collection of poetry by Australian poet Mary Gilmore. [1]
The collection consists of 124 poems, the majority of which are published for the first time in this volume.
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The Courier-Mail noted the publication of the collection in an editorial, stating: "This delightful book, with its six score poems and one, proves that the well of poetry in her heart has not dried up, and if they have not all been drawn from that fountain within the last lustrum (though many are quite recent) they are all well worth preserving. These pages, as might be expected, have the wistfulness of an aftermath garnered at eventide and tinged with the light of sunset...Her ear has never been dulled to "the still, sad music of humanity" by the glitter and clatter of this swiftly-moving age." [2]
The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English noted that the collection "maintains earlier ambivalences towards warfare, but the balance here is less towards praising the heroism of war's soldiers ("For Anzac (1939)") and more toward attacking those addressed in "To the War-Mongers"...In a wider sense, however, Gilmore engages with other social and political battlefields." [3]
Anglo-Welsh literature and Welsh writing in English are terms used to describe works written in the English language by Welsh writers. It has been recognised as a distinctive entity only since the 20th century. The need for a separate identity for this kind of writing arose because of the parallel development of modern Welsh-language literature; as such it is perhaps the youngest branch of English-language literature in the British Isles.
This article focuses on poetry from the United Kingdom written in the English language. The article does not cover poetry from other countries where the English language is spoken, including Southern Ireland after December 1922.
"The Second Coming" is a poem written by Irish poet W. B. Yeats in 1919, first printed in The Dial in November 1920, and afterwards included in his 1921 collection of verses Michael Robartes and the Dancer. The poem uses Christian imagery regarding the Apocalypse and Second Coming to allegorically describe the atmosphere of post-war Europe. It is considered a major work of modernist poetry and has been reprinted in several collections, including The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry.
Dame Mary Jean Gilmore was an Australian writer and journalist known for her prolific contributions to Australian literature and the broader national discourse. She wrote both prose and poetry.
Winifred Mary Letts (1882–1972) was an English-born writer who spent most of her life in Ireland. She was known for her novels, plays and poetry.
Mary Jane Oliver was an American poet who won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Her work is inspired by nature, rather than the human world, stemming from her lifelong passion for solitary walks in the wild. It is characterised by a sincere wonderment at the impact of natural imagery, conveyed in unadorned language. In 2007 she was declared to be the country's best-selling poet.
Mary Dorcey is an Irish poet, novelist and short story writer. Her work explores issues of women's sexual identity, the power of the erotic, and political injustice. She was a pioneer of gay rights in Ireland.
Anne Killigrew (1660–1685) was an English poet, who was also a painter. Born in London, Killigrew is perhaps best known as the subject of a famous elegy by the poet John Dryden entitled To The Pious Memory of the Accomplish'd Young Lady Mrs. Anne Killigrew (1686). She was however a skilful poet in her own right, and her Poems were published posthumously in 1686. Dryden compared her poetic abilities to the famous Greek poet of antiquity, Sappho. Killigrew died of smallpox aged 25.
Meena Alexander was an Indian poet, scholar, and writer. Born in Allahabad, India, and raised in India and Sudan, Alexander lived and worked in New York City, where she was Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and at the CUNY Graduate Center in the PhD program in English.
Una Maud Victoria Marson was a Jamaican feminist, activist and writer, producing poems, plays and radio programmes.
Mary Lou Mackey is an American novelist, poet, and academic. She is the author of eight collections of poetry and fourteen novels, including the New York Times best-seller A Grand Passion and The Village of Bones, The Year The Horses Came, The Horses At The Gate, and The Fires of Spring, four sweeping historical novels that take as their subject the earth-centered, Goddess-worshiping cultures of Neolithic Europe. In 2012, her sixth collection of poetry, Sugar Zone, won a PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award. Another collection, The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams: New and Selected Poems 1974 to 2018, won a 2018 Women’s Spirituality Book Award from the California Institute of Integral Studies; and the 2019 Eric Hoffer Small Press Award for the best book published by a small press. Her first novel, Immersion, was the first novel published by a Second Wave feminist press. Long concerned with environmental issues, Mackey frequently writes about the rainforests of Costa Rica and the Brazilian Amazon. In the early 1970s, as Professor of English and Writer-In-Residence at California State University, Sacramento, she was instrumental in the founding of the CSUS Women's Studies Program and the CSUS English Department Graduate Creative Writing Program. From 1989-1992, she served as President of the West Coast Branch of PEN American Center involving herself in PEN's international defense of persecuted writers.
Rajzel Żychlińsky was a Polish-born writer of poetry in Yiddish. She published seven collections over six decades. Her first two collections were published in Warsaw in 1936 and 1939, just prior to World War II. She survived the war by fleeing eastward to the Soviet Union, but many members of her immediate family were murdered in the Holocaust. Her postwar poetry, mostly written in the United States, was strongly influenced by these events. Barnett Zumoff writes that "she was the most authentic and original of the female Yiddish poets." Karina von Tippelskirch writes "Rajzel Zychlinsky (1910–2001) is considered one of the greatest Yiddish poets of the 20th century and a master of the small poetic form."
Mary Darwall, who sometimes wrote as Harriett Airey, was an English poet and playwright. She was a member of the Shenstone Circle of writers that gathered around William Shenstone in the English Midlands. She later explored subjects that included the nature of female friendship and the place of women writers.
For much of the twentieth century, a deep ignorance was displayed towards British women's literature of World War I. Scholars reasoned that women had not fought combatively, thus, did not play as significant a role as men. Accordingly, only one body of work, Vera Brittain’s autobiographical, Testament of Youth, was added to the canon of Great War literature. Conversely, anthologies published mid-century such as Brian Gardner's, Up the Line to Death: The War Poets of 1914-1918, contained no mention of contributions made by women. Similarly, Jon Silkin’s 1979 anthology, Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, included the work of only two women, Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva. However, new research has changed ideological beliefs about the role women assumed in producing authentic accounts of war. More specifically, in Britain, research attends to an explanation of how women's war literature shaped feminist discourse during and immediately following the war.
A miscellany is a collection of various pieces of writing by different authors. Meaning a mixture, medley, or assortment, a miscellany can include pieces on many subjects and in a variety of different forms. In contrast to anthologies, whose aim is to give a selective and canonical view of literature, miscellanies were produced for the entertainment of a contemporary audience and so instead emphasise collectiveness and popularity. Laura Mandell and Rita Raley state:
This last distinction is quite often visible in the basic categorical differences between anthologies on the one hand, and all other types of collections on the other, for it is in the one that we read poems of excellence, the "best of English poetry," and it is in the other that we read poems of interest. Out of the differences between a principle of selection and a principle of collection, then, comes a difference in aesthetic value, which is precisely what is at issue in the debates over the "proper" material for inclusion into the canon.
Lady Charlotte Elliot, born Charlotte Carnegie, was a Scottish poet born on 22 July 1839 in the parish of Farnell, Angus. Despair and abandonment are prominent in her three volumes.
Mary Masters (1694?-1759?) was an English poet and letter-writer of the 18th century, who has gained some historic attention because of her association with Samuel Johnson. Contemporary evaluations stress her contribution to the evolving model of women in society, both by her publishing her work, and by the themes and opinions in that work.
Susanna Watts (1768–1842) was a noted English abolitionist, author, translator and artist.
Máire Bradshaw, is a writer, poet and publisher. Bradshaw was born in Limerick in 1943. She was educated in Laurel Hill convent before moving to Cork. There she got involved with the feminist movement. Bradshaw runs Bradshaw Books founded in 1985 as the Cork Women's Poetry Circle. She has published Theo Dorgan and Dympna Dreyer amongst others. Bradshaw is a poet and was commissioned in 1991 to write the poem to celebrate the freedom of the city of Cork given to Mary Robinson, the first female president of Ireland as well as reading the presidential poem during her inauguration. Her work is also in a number of anthologies as well as collections of her own work. Bradshaw is also the director of Tig Fili, an organisation designed to provide workshops in art and poetry.
Isabella Lickbarrow was an English poet from Kendal who is sometimes associated with the Lake Poets. She published two collections: Poetical Effusions (1814) and A Lament upon the Death of Her Royal Highness the Princess Charlotte; and Alfred, a Vision (1818). Her corpus covers a wide variety of subjects, but scholars have noted in particular her topographical poetry and political poetry about the Napoleonic Wars.