Sea Garden

"Rose, harsh rose, / marred and with stint of petals-" So opens Sea Garden (1916), H. D.'s first book and the purest distillation of Imagism. Here are twenty-seven taut, crystalline poems of salt, wind, and the sea's hard edge - flowers battered and sharpened by surf, the gods of the shore, the tide closing over. Nothing is soft; everything is exact. Ezra Pound, who first sent her work to print signed "H. D., Imagiste," called it "objective-no slither." Among these poems - "Sea Rose," "The Helmsman," "Sheltered Garden," "Sea Gods," "Hermes of the Ways" - a new music entered English poetry: spare, hard, luminous, and utterly modern. A newly typeset Northlume Library edition, every poem on its own page, behind an original mixed-media cover illustration by JVB Atelier Designs.