Mary Carolyn Davies - Songs of a Girl & Other Verses

Mary Caroline Davies - Songs of a Girl & Other Verses
Public Domain Poets #4

'Songs of a Girl & Other Verses' brings together over 100 of Mary Carolyn Davies' unrhymed verses, including the 29 song sequence 'Songs of a Girl' (first published 1919), the 24 song sequence 'Songs' (1917), and a generous selection of other song sequences, verses, and variants (originally published from 1914-1920), none of which have been anthologised before. New edition designed, edited, and selected by Dick Whyte.

The sun falls
Like a drop of blood
From some hero.

We,
Who love pain,
Delight in this.

Mary Carolyn Davies was a poet from Oregon, born in Sprague, and later attended Berkley University. She left college after only a year, and moved to Greenwich Village, meeting poets and artists like Marianne Moore, Alfred Kreymborg, and Marcel Duchamp, among others. Best known for her rhymed verses, Davies was also an early practitioner of 'free verse', and wrote numerous unrhymed 'song' sequences, first published in Kreymborg's 'Others: A Magazine of the New Verse' (1915-1919). Davies' unrhymed verse was largely composed in compressed and fragmented forms, such as the couplet;

I am going to die too, flower, in a little while-
Do not be so proud.

The triplet;

Red as dawn
The apple petals burn
Against my burning cheek.

And the quartet and quintet;

The moon
Strikes my hand
Across my face as I lie.
And the pain of it
Keeps me from sleeping.

Davies' verse also explores feminist and queer themes, particularly in the sequence 'Songs' (1916 version), clearly addressed to another woman, in which Davies writes such powerful lines as;

Give me your lips-
I would live-
Your eyes are two miracles;
And I, who have seen them,
Believe.

Public Domain Press is dedicated to producing contemporary editions of out-of-print poets and poetry collections, particularly with regard to compressed and fragmented "free" verse from the late-1800s and early-1900s. All poems start as facsimiles - to preserve the original fonts - which are then cleaned up, edited for consistency, and spaciously laid-out, adorned with borders, illustrations, and ornaments from the books and magazines they originally appeared in. These are not "reprints" of previously existing books, but newly crafted collections, lovingly edited from public domain material, for the serious poetry lover.