One of the virtues of the ground-breaking Apocalypse anthology brought out by Carcanet in 2020 (edited by James Keery) was as a trove of forgotten poets from the previously neglected period of the mid-20th century. Keery proved particularly adept at unearthing women writers eclipsed by the more celebrated male names both of figures primarily associated with the 1940s and those who moved on from an earlier Dylan Thomas-inflected style to other ways of working in the 50s and 60s (eg. Larkin, Davie). Compared to the earlier modernist generation, which saw female poets such as HD and Mina Loy published and applauded alongside their male counterparts, there was a falling off of this comparatively more inclusive landscape during the 30s and 40s. Apart from the notable exceptions of Lynette Roberts and Kathleen Raine (both of whom featured in the anthology), the list of women poets from this period whose work is still read and in print was remarkably slim prior to the publication of Apocalypse.
Julian Orde was outstanding among these new and re-discoveries. Her agile, exuberant poems – charged with ‘visionary modernism’ in Keery’s sense and touched by the period Apocalyptic style but never enslaved by it – culminated in an excerpt from an intriguing longer poem called ‘Conjurors’, which homes in on the emergence of a butterfly from its cocoon (‘she walks like a boat on the beach/Dragging her drying sails’) with the defamilarising eye for telling detail of great nature writing (the Annie Dillard of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek sprung to this reviewer’s mind). Now Keery has made good on the promise of those four beguiling poems by collating a substantial volume of Orde’s work, published last year by Carcanet as Conjurors. The editorial task must have been challenging as Orde never published a book in her lifetime, and her oeuvre was scattered across three decades’ worth of little magazines and journals. But this only accounts for around twenty poems – the other 60 Keery includes are previously unpublished works from papers left after Orde’s death in 1974.
Reading this astonishing body of lost poetry is like finding a mislaid jigsaw-piece that fills a key gap in the complex puzzle of 20th century literary history, making the intermittent picture of British modernist poetry a little clearer. Particularly in terms of poetry written by women, Orde seems a missing link between the work of Lynette Roberts (although hers is more allied to a Neo-Romantic/Apocalyptic manner than Roberts’) and the 60s poetry of Rosemary Tonks, who she resembles in her playful incorporation of surrealism into phonetically rich lyric forms, and from Tonks onward to Maggie O’Sullivan and Denise Riley. I was going to say that the neglect Orde’s work has suffered seems surprising given her connections with other prominent poets of the period but in fact perhaps it was these very associations that impeded her from establishing her own voice, given the reputational damage the entire Forties generation endured in subsequent decades. We could also mention the belittling perspective of being known more as a girlfriend and muse rather than as a serious poet in her own right. Having just been reading Kate Zambreno’s Heroines – a feminist revaluation of the “mad wives” of modernism (Vivienne Eliot, Zelda Fitzgerald, Jane Bowles) and the ways their lives and own writings were side-lined by their illustrious husbands – I am intrigued to track how the same phenomenon applies all too regularly to later 20th century writers.
The Carcanet Conjurors is a wonderful edition, including an informative introduction and compelling essay by Keery on the poet’s life and work in its context, and some letters from the 1940’s. The fact that Orde was a girlfriend of WS Graham’s, had a brief affair with Dylan Thomas, and John Laurie, the actor who played Fraser in Dad’s Army) should not define our recognition of her. Nor did she define herself by her poetry: she went on to work (with varying degrees of success) as an actress, a scriptwriter, a playwright, and an advertising copywriter. The figure who shines through Keery’s essay, however, is her long-standing friend and correspondent David Wright, who more than anyone else was able to see the lasting importance of Orde’s poems and is himself another key poet of the period who deserves rediscovery.
Oliver Dixon 27th February 2025
