fifty-one: Charlotte Mew, Selected Poems

I broke the rules again! And grievously, choosing a selected works this time instead of a whole collection. But there wasn’t a huge amount of choice in the local bookshop where I was buying my last few treats of 2008, and I’d been wanting to read Charlotte Mew since reading about her in the Cambridge Companion to Twentieth Century English Poetry. Plus, like I said, it was the end of the year. Rules are there to be broken.

Before reading about her just at the beginning of last year, I’d never heard of Mew; I think she’s somewhat neglected. But according to the introduction to this selection, by Eavan Boland, who also selected the poems, she shouldn’t be; for Boland, Mew was instrumental in ‘the great unshackling of women’s voices in poetry’, thanks in part to her perspective as an outsider (although in her lifetime Mew was commended…