Praised for her lyricism and mastery of meter and rhyme, Marya Zaturenska's poetry lit up American literature in the 1900s. But with the giddy 1920s, Zaturenska's traditional lyric grace and penchant for artifice rendered her passé. By her mid-thirties, Zaturenska had succumbed to emotional and physical illness. At the same time her work blossomed and critics acclaimed her for elevating lyric conventions to new plateaus. In 1937, she won a Pulitzer Prize for her magical collection,
Cold
Morning Sky.
She was only thirty-six years old at the time.
Critics pointed out that Zaturenska had assimilated lyric conventions and made them original and new. "What is so fine about these poems is that the control implicit in them does not lead to sterility or to false emotion," wrote the
New York
Times Book Review.
"She is a mystic, but how neatly she refines the word." This new edition consists of over one hundred poems and twenty translations drawn from eight previous books. Early poetry from her teenage years reveals Zaturenska's budding talent, and an introduction by fellow poet and close friend Robert Phillips places this gifted writer firmly in both the historic and lyric tradition.