Djuna Barnes is one of those small, sharp points of vividness that seem to hover around important periods of literary history: quick, peripheral, mosquito-like, delirious, drunk on strange intensities. She was in Paris during the high time of Modernism and seemed to know everyone, go everywhere, hear everything. Literary life was a whirl, all "glorias," as she wrote sardonically in her notes toward the memoir she never lived to finish: all "apéritifs, Amontillado sherry or Rhine wines, cocaine, opium, or Cocteau." T.S. Eliot took her to lunch; she called Joyce "Jim"; Gertrude Stein praised her ankles. As a writer—she produced novels, poems, and plays—her manner was lushly and sensationally gothic, and seemed eccentric to those pillars of conformity, Stein and Ezra Pound. She was taken seriously, only not quite seriously. Even Eliot, who championed her work—he published her novel Nightwood at Faber and Faber and acted informally as her literary agent—had reservations. When he convinced Faber, against his better judgment, to publish her play The Antiphon, he contributed what must be one of the most backhanded blurbs in the history of the medium. "Never has so much genius," he wrote, "been combined with so little talent." This was in 1956, evidently a time before "Wickedly funny a magisterial tour de force!" was the sound writers made when they snored.

It was a whirl for Djuna Barnes, or at least it looked like one from the outside; from the inside it jostled, and it may have really hurt. She was born in 1892 to a family that would have seemed eccentric to more people than just Stein and Pound. Her grandmother, the journalist, suffragist, and spiritualist Zadel Barnes Gustafson, was the domineering matriarch; erotic letters written from grandmother to granddaughter when the latter was in her late teens have led some to conclude that there existed between them what a scholar, employing what one hopes is a high degree of understatement, has called "one of the rarest forms of incest." Her father, Wald Barnes, was a painter and polygamist; he failed at the one, and must have been somewhat comforted by succeeding at the other. "Fearful," according to Barnes scholars Phillip Herring and Osías Stutman, "of anti-polygamist wrath," he had his children educated at home. Home, it almost goes without saying, was a sort of ghastly utopian farm. Even after she left it, Barnes helped to support her family for many years. She got by as a newspaper reporter and illustrator in New York until 1921, when McCall's sent her to Paris.

For a long time Barnes's reputation has rested on Nightwood, her novel about lesbian life in Paris, which she wrote while living with Peggy Guggenheim after the breakup of her relationship with Thelma Wood. Her career as a poet has been largely overlooked, in part because, until quite recently, so many of her poems were unknown. When the war broke out, she returned to New York, took an apartment in Greenwich Village, and went into a seclusion that lasted forty years; it was assumed that she had all but ceased to write. But all that time, it turns out, she was writing poetry, and working hard at it, too: piling up hundreds of drafts, filling every odd scrap of paper, and feeling her way toward a new style—one that would be derived, surprisingly, less from other Modernists than from the seventeenth-century Metaphysicals whom she must have discovered through Eliot.

The results of this long experiment have now been published, in a new Collected Poems that places them alongside her earlier verse and the notes toward her prose memoirs, and they are fascinating. There isn't a great poem in this book; very little of the later work is even finished. But the record of this light and furious mind slowly unraveling itself in the attempt to say what it had to say is painfully compelling, and Barnes frequently rises to moments of splendid poetry. She calls the falling Lucifer, marvelously, a "salmon of the air." Her manner is rhythmically compressed, aphoristic, riddling; she dwells on inscrutable allegories, often drawn from a private stock of warped Christian imagery:

How should one mourn who never yet has been
In any trampled list at Umbria? Nor seen
The Unicorn thrust in his dousing beam?
And Mary from the manger of her gown,
Ride Jesus down.

She is almost entirely sealed off from the main currents of influence in twentieth-century poetry, though as in the example above she sometimes echoes the more cryptic mode of Yeats. ("The crowns of Nineveh" would be at home in many of her poems.) At times she reads like a strange combination of Donne and Swinburne; at other times, fantastically, like something scribbled by a goblin from Christina Rossetti:

When I was an infant
Knuckling my foot,
Keeling on the huck-bone,
Blowing through my snout,
It was observed by huntsmen
(Though they did not shoot)
I was in my hubris,
Bowling Gods about.

The backgrounds of these poems, even when they appear to be comical, are almost always bitter, and this is in many ways a difficult book to read. Barnes frequently loses control of her powers and writes verse that is gory or mawkish or absurd. It should be remembered that many of these poems are drafts, written very late in her life. But even so, her anger and anguish at such moments can be terrible, as in these lines about childbirth:

When he came headlong through the bloody door
It was his mother freighter that he wore.
The skelit from the skeleton being won
It grew impudent and lifting leg upon
The fawning of his tomb;
The dark placenta, and the bait
Where now the farding-bag and its green swill
The coined his faces with her narrative?

We begin to feel, however, that the real achievements of this poetry depend on its never being far from a breakdown; that to convey the view from the edge of the abyss it was necessary to risk falling into it. Had Barnes governed herself, had she written poems that might have "succeeded" in a more conventional sense, she might never have attained the beautiful and violent and glorious extremes that sporadically fill this book. But she didn't. And so she did.

— Brian Phillips