Mary Barnard: Complete Poems and Selected Translations

The most comprehensive collection of writing by award-winning US poet, renowned translator of Sappho, and trailblazing archivist Mary Barnard.

Born in the Pacific Northwest, Mary Barnard (1909-2001) struck up correspondence with Ezra Pound in 1933, won Poetry magazine's prestigious Levinson Award in 1935, and moved to New York City the following year. There she met Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams, who proclaimed her writing emblematic of "what we have been about all these years." This fully annotated volume makes available Barnard's complete poems for the first time, along with a robust selection of her translations and prose. Most well-known for her bestselling Sappho and her influential role as the inaugural poetry curator at the University at Buffalo, Barnard was a "second-wave" modernist and "late" Imagist whose regionally grounded writing also anticipated later eco-poetry. The volume's editor, Barnard scholar and biographer Sarah Barnsley, situates Barnard's work within these broader literary and cultural currents. Previously unpublished poems appear alongside Barnard's essays on her creative practice and friendships, illuminating the career, oeuvre, and ethos of this pivotal yet still underappreciated twentieth-century figure. With a foreword by Mary de Rachewiltz (author of Ezra Pound, Father and Teacher) and afterword by Barnard's literary executor Elizabeth J. Bell, Mary Barnard is essential reading for poets, scholars, and translators.