“There is a sort of salt and spray about reading Mew for the first time,” says Eavan Boland in her introduction. “Her poems are not like anything else.” Boland should know. She is herself a profound poet, and a radical thinker about poetry. She keeps her copy of Mew's 1953 Collected Poems to hand, “always knowing that within its rosy, tattered dust jacket and sturdy covers burns and lives the music of dissidence”.

Charlotte Mew did not fit in her own time. She was born in 1869, the daughter of a genteel professional family dogged by poverty, ill-health, and mental breakdown. Two of her siblings ended their lives in institutions. So, as Boland says, Mew's poetry is “cluttered” with cemeteries, asylums, sea roads, cheap rooms and broken dolls. Her subjects are eerie and unsettling. The desperate voice of the rejected lover in The Farmer's Bride is sad, but hints at sexual violence - “Oh! My God! The down,/ The soft young down of her, the brown,/ The brown of her - her eyes, her hair, her hair!” Lost love and a failure to be brave mark A quoi bon dire, Rooms and On the Road to the Sea. The lonely speaker in The Quiet House longs for death: “Some day I shall not think; I shall not be!”

But it is Mew's form that is strangest of all. Her poems break all the rules. In fact, they know no rules. She fragments images and rends her grammar. She makes lines that limp and then fly. Sometimes they are excessively, insistently long, or cut off abruptly. Her lines are spiky, obsessive, wilful. But then, so was she.

The issue of gender and sexuality is, as Boland says, not overtly discussed in the poems, but is “nevertheless the weather of many of them”. Awkward, proud and fey, Mew's private life was as difficult as her public life as a poet. She drank Lysol one Saturday in 1928 and died horribly. But her poems - awkward, haunting and brave - are not easily forgotten.

Selected Poems of CHARLOTTE MEW
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