Lola Ridge
LIGHT IN HAND: Early Selected Poems of Lola Ridge
Ed. by Daniel Tobin

Quale Press
ISBN-10: 0-9792999-1-8
ISBN-13: 978-0-9792999-1-9
Paper, 102 pp.
$15

Lola Ridge, poet, editor, and passionate crusader for social justice, was a fixture of the New York literary avant-garde in the early twentieth century. Ridge’s outspoken political views and vivid, original verse earned her a place of prominence amidst such left-wing reformers and artists as Kay Boyle, John Dos Passos, and Harold Loeb, as well as luminaries of modernist American poetry including William Carlos Williams and Hart Crane. However, since her death in 1941, Ridge’s writing has become little more than a footnote to the history of American modernist poetry, and her estate has failed to issue a collected works.

Light in Hand therefore offers selections from Ridge’s first three volumes of poetry that have entered the public domain: The Ghetto and Other Poems, Sun-Up and Other Poems, and Red Flag. The poems in this volume showcase Ridge’s critical yet compassionate eye for the world around her, from the Jewish ghetto of the Lower East Side to the bloody frontlines of World War I. Rich with finely-drawn details of person and place, Ridge’s poems marry a materialist political sensibility with a deep spiritual belief in the ability of humankind to transcend the world’s havoc and strife. As Ridge writes in “Obliteration” of “The emptily effacing air,/ That has closed upon so many cries…/ Yet holds in its blue vacuum/ No bleached white evidence,” it is often the work of history to bury the cries of the oppressed, as well as those who try to speak out against injustice. It was Ridge’s lifelong mission to counteract this erasure and illuminate that evidence.

“Lola Ridge stood a little apart from the rest, with what it is not too much to characterize as her own genius.” —William Rose Benét, 1941

This volume is edited and features an introduction by Daniel Tobin, Chair of the Writing, Literature, and Publishing Department at Emerson College in Boston. Tobin is the author of three books of poems, Where the World Is Made (University Press of New England 1999), Double Life (Louisiana State University Press, 2004), and The Narrows (Four Way Books, 2005), and has won numerous award including The Discovery/The Nation Award, The Robert Penn Warren Award, and a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Tobin has also published numerous critical essays on modern and contemporary poetry.

POETRY