The opening lines of Hope Mirrlees’s poem Paris plunge the reader in place and personal experience. “I want a holophrase”, it begins, and perhaps that is what the whole work is trying to be, for a holophrase is a single word that stands for a complex idea. Paris, a single word, encapsulating the history and romance of this city. Capital letters, italics, parentheses and found phrases are scattered across the page: advertisements for drinking chocolate, aperitifs and cigarettes, stations on the Métro. “I can’t/I must go slowly”, the first page ends, prompting the reader, too, to take a breath, to consider the work with which she is being presented.
Paris was first published one hundred years ago by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press – two years before those great landmarks of male modernism, TS Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses. As the poet and scholar Sandeep Parmar writes in her afterword, there have been several attempts to reintroduce the poem to readers over the course of the past century, attempts that were (largely) unsuccessful. Faber & Faber has now released an elegant – and useful – edition of the poem, which comes equipped with Parmar’s contextual essay, detailed notes by the Woolf scholar Julia Briggs, and a vivacious foreword by the novelist Deborah Levy. As Levy writes, this remarkable poem is an “immersive polyphonic adventure”, an intense echo of a day and a night spent walking through Paris in 1919. The slaughter of the First World War was over; the world was being remade, along with language, art and culture.
Content from our partners
