Kora and Ka with Mira-Mare

Hilda Doolittle

Jan 1996 · New Directions Bibelot Book 0 · New Directions Publishing

About this ebook

Written by H. D. in 1930 and only published in a 100-copy edition for friends in 1934, Kora and Ka marked a new level of intensity in the poet's experiments with prose fiction. The two long stories contained in this volume, Kora and Ka and Mira-Mare, are at once profoundly autobiographical yet, through H. D.'s unusual brand of modernist story-telling, pushed beyond personality. The men and women who haunt these tales are wraiths in spiritual exile, wanderers in a Europe still recovering from the devastations of World War I. Her descriptions of the beaches at Monte Carlo are triumphs of vivid detail - bright watercolors set against brooding psychological portraits. In its exploration of the broken dualities of self and civilization, Kora and Ka looks forward to H. D.'s masterpieces, Tribute to Freud and Trilogy.

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About the author

Hilda Doolittle was born in September 1886 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. She is a poet and a novelist known as being a member of the poetry group avant-garde Imagists who believed in writing about what they chose. This later lead to her writings on modernism. She moved to London in 1911 where she met Ezra Pound who encouraged her writing. Her poetry was published in the English Review and the Transatlantic Review. Her work often borrowed images from classical Greek literature to evoke a particular feeling in the reader. In 1911 she sailed to Europe and met Richard Aldington - a poet whop would help her in her career and along with Pound the three poets became known as the "three original Imagists". Pound gave her the nickname H.D. Imagiste and it stuck. Some of her poetry collections are Helen in Egypt and Hermetic Definition. She also wrote several books such as "Hermione" and "The Gift".