Though Gently

by Laura Riding, Laura (Riding) Jackson

29 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1930

About the author

Laura (Riding) Jackson was an American poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer.

1923-1926 as Laura Riding Gottschalk
1927-1939 as Laura Riding
1963-1991 as Laura (Riding) Jackson

She also published under the pseudonym Madeleine Vara.

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Laura Riding's masterpiece of miscellany, 29 pp. long to match her 29 life-years and published in the aftermath of Poems: A Joking Word, because she was printing it herself (it was the fifth Seizin), and well -- why not. As she herself puts it, in "What Is There To Believe In": "There is a no-sense and a corresponding sense. | There is an irresponsibility and a corresponding responsibility. |There is a question and a corresponding answer." These axioms are "there," on Riding's first page. They are published no place else in her oeuvre. What tropes "there" is simply "T". But between her readers, 'there' will be only an upside-down "T". Thus, "Let T stand for the interpretive world of leverage." But how let upside-down? The poet, working between verse and prose formats, is on a very serious holiday indeed. Not at all a certainty who read this book (printed in 200 copies, in 2001 Alan J. Clark initiated a private census of copies in private & public collections and found 46) when it appeared, but it anticipates the New York School of poets, Robert Duncan's Eisenhower administration, 2nd wave feminism and much else.