Prismatic Ground

by Marguerite Young

The author's first book, a volume of poetry.

Genres: Poetry

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1937

About the author

Marguerite Vivian Young was an American author of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and criticism. Her work evinced an interest in the American identity, social issues, and environmentalism.

Her first book of poetry was published in 1937, while she was teaching high-school English in Indianapolis. In that same year, she visited New Harmony, Indiana, the site of two former utopian communities, where her mother and stepfather resided. She relocated to New Harmony and spent seven years there, beginning work on Angel in the Forest, a study of utopian concepts and communities.

Angel in the Forest was published in 1945 to universal acclaim, winning the Guggenheim and Newberry Library awards. Over the next fifty years, while maintaining an address in New York's Greenwich Village, she traveled extensively and wrote articles, poetry, and book reviews for numerous magazines and newspapers. She was also renowned as a teacher of writing at a number of venues, including the New School for Social Research and Fordham University.

Marguerite Young's epic novel, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, was informed by her concept of history and pluralistic psychology, as well as her poetic prose style with its many layers of images and languages.

Reviews

[George]

"In an interview with the Paris Review, Young recounted, 'We were brought up to believe that to be born in Indiana was to be born a poet—a myth which I can't accept now, but I did then.'"

Is this an apology? my wife asks. Perhaps. Either way, Young is right about the myth, these poems are over-pastoral and cringe-rhymey. In a word (or two), old fashioned. No poet should write as if Emily Dickinson didn't exist, whose oeuvre is a milestone for the form in the same way Joyce's is for fiction. This is juvenilia that exhibits many of the same images - leaves, waves, beaches, moons, suns, one instance of planet - that Young would go on to repeat for hundreds and hundreds of pages in Miss Macintosh, My Darling, that suckubus of semantic satiation. Aside from the rare line, the only poem that approached something I could enjoy was "Strange Prophecy":

Only by bees will be visited
The lonely portals of the dead.

They will come intent on trade
Of light within that house of shade.

Yea, yellow light of wild, clear honey
Will gild the darkness none can see,

The skull's enigma, what it was,
Become a hive for honey bees.

Overall, I would only recommend this for the passionate Young completionist at best.

[Zachary Tanner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Floral shades of Millay + the strange irony of Barrett Browning + the psychedelic expansiveness of Coleridge

The only other review of this book was made possible by the diligent work of yours truly. A book absurdly overpriced for its antiquity and rarity (if not its quality-despite-being-out-of-print), which I own in a pdf scanned courtesy the Beinecke Rare Books librarians at Yale. I tried for years to find an affordable copy of this book. Thought I found a $40 one once, but the seller wrote me after I purchased it to say the book didn't exist. Did it, but did my purchase make them realize that they could ask $350 for it and they changed their mind? It is absurd to think that anyone with the time to read and obsess enough to appreciate Young in all her paracrystalline glory would also have the time to work to afford it. Damn the world! Thank Seshat for libraries!

Dedicated to Alice Bidwell Wesenberg. The Indianapolis Sunday Star (April 13, 1941) dubbed there "a world of significance in that dedication. It is an acknowledgment of years of patient counsel and assistance, of encouragement and understanding."

Hard to think Wesenberg, whatever she accomplished in her poetry salon at 429 Buckingham drive, could have done much to inspire such a singularly kaleidoscopic mind as Young. 52 poems I am shelving on my tbr-the-next-time-I-take-mushrooms, for the prismatic synesthesia herein, illuminated by the mind, tricks the witnessing self into dreaming, as Proust by Arabian shadow-shifting upon the wall.

[Jacob · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m a big fan of Marguerite Young’s poetry & had been reading & enjoying this work for years. So I’m here to announce the good news that this book will be included in Marguerite Young’s “Collected Poems”, ed. Joshua Rothes, Phil Bevis, & myself, published jointly by Chatwin Books & Sublunary Editions, both of Seattle, WA. The release date is September 6, 2022.

Press release:

https://sublunaryeditions.com/blog/th...


And here’s the product page link:

https://sublunaryeditions.com/product...

Exciting!