A Review of Lola Ridge's Collected Early Writing

Have a look at Jena Schmitt's review of To the Many: Collected Early Poems (Little Island Press, 2018), by radical poet Lola Ridge, in the newest issue of PN Review. "Throughout her life she moved from Ireland to Australia to New Zealand back to Australia to California to New York, and though her birth name was Emily Rose, she changed it many times: Emily Rose became Rose became Rosa became Rosalie became Delores became Lola became Sybill Robson became Rosa Bernard, became Lola Ridge again." More:

...Her later collections, Firehead (1929), heralded by the New York Times, and Dance of Fire (1935), are not included here, out of print and difficult to find, save for bits and pieces of poems online. As Tobin in the introduction writes: ‘For more than thirty years neither the planned biography nor the collected poems… have come to light. Moreover, it is accurate to say that Lola Ridge’s literary estate has been considerably “protected”…’. 

Ridge was born in 1873 and grew up at the tail end of the Victorian era, with its corsets and curved-heel boots, courting chairs and fan-shaped dance cards, but she wrote and published in the first half of the twentieth century, with WWI, the Great Depression, women’s suffrage, working-class movements, union worker strikes, the Russian Revolution, gender and race discrimination, race riots and antisemitism clanging up against each other, making themselves known. 

An undeniably passionate leftist poet, she wrote about what was around her, about the apartments, neighbourhoods, and tenements she lived in (‘A late snow beats / With cold white fists upon the tenements –’), about the working man, immigrant lives, poverty, hardships, racial and gender inequality, lynchings, murder, executions, imprisonment. ‘I write about something I feel intensely,’ Ridge said in an interview, ‘how can you help writing about something you feel intensely.’

Continue reading at PN Review.