Tartarus Press

publishers

The Lost Poetry is published by Tartarus Press and PS Publishing as a sewn hardback book of 137 + xi pages with silk ribbon marker, head and tailbands, and d/w.

 

Second Tartarus Press printing.

 

ISBN 1904619312

 

Sorry - out of print

The Lost Poetry

by

William Hope Hodgson

 

The Lost Poetry presents three previously unpublished collections of William Hope Hodgson’s verse, as he arranged them: Mors Deorum and Other Poems, Through Enchantments and Other Poems on Death, and Spume, which together include forty-three poems never seen before.

 

Hodgson is best known for his novels and stories of horror and the supernatural, but, despite the lack of previous critical research into his poetry, the sheer quantity of output proves Jane Frank’s assertion that ‘... poetry was a significant creative outlet for Hodgson through-out his adult life’.

 

The poems range widely in form—from ballads, epic verse, and dirges to sea shanties—and, perhaps not surprisingly, given Hodgson’s early apprenticeship in the Merchant Navy, it is the sea which ‘provides the most dramatic and compelling motif ... and which informs and illustrates [Hodgson’s] most frequently explored themes: death, immortality, love, religious faith, patriotism, loss, the meaning of life.’

 

‘Nightmarish lights, breathless gloom, silent streams where “dim, ghostly trout shine in the spectral shallows”; these and many other original concepts are revealed in Hodgson’s poetry, providing pleasure for enthusiasts and the more general reader alike. The total effect ... is to reveal William Hope Hodgson as at core a writer vividly alive, vigorous and pulsing with energy.’ Jane Frank

 

See also The Wandering Soul by William Hope Hodgson (£30)

 

Review:

'The major fantasy small press publication of the present century so far, in my opinion, is ... The Wandering Soul, a magnificent compilation of material from the archive of William Hope Hodgson. I confess to being seriously envious ... there was no way that any effort of mine would have achieved the same magnificence.' George Locke, Ferret Fantasy

 

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