I've recently received a copy of the latest vol in the Garland Shelley:
The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts Vol V: The Witch of Atlas Notebook ed.
Carlene A. Adamson. Garland 1997. Dollars 195.
The format of these vols is facsimile notebook pages with facing
transcriptions plus apparatus etc. Apart from the Witch of Atlas this
one includes fragmentary drafts of quite a few shorter poems & prose
plus the usual rough sketches of trees, moon-boats etc & calculations of
domestic expenses interwoven with the texts.
I suppose the price means that these books are rarely seen outside
libraries and/or by specialists, which is a shame since the project is
in effect building up a body of Shelley's work which is quite distinct
from the work found in the standard collected editions; much spacier,
playing across shifting levels of indeterminacy. It's a different
placement, at times allowing a reading along a trajectory from, say,
Olson to Susan Howe; but perhaps that's the wrong way round - rather
that the more recent poetics has enabled that reading or for that matter
the project itself. If the term means anything these transcriptions are
'language' texts of the first order! Particularly apparent in the new
vol, I think, since Garland have at last computer-set the transcripts,
getting much closer to the ms variations - previous vols were done on a
rather crude electronic typewriter face which was very limiting.
--
Alan Halsey
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