Stories and Essays of Mina Loy

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Born in London in 1882, Mina Loy was an artist, inventor, novelist, actor, and prose writer, but as yet, her foothold in modernist history is secured by her poetry. Loy remains best known for a collection of poems entitled Lunar Baedecker that she published in Paris in 1923.1 The title poem is a travel guide to a lunar landscape that is decadent and deteriorating, a heady combination of modern and ancient. Here, “Delirious avenues” are

lit

with the chandelier souls

of infusoria

from Pharaoh’s tombstones

Loy’s cityscape contains not a red-light but a “white-light district of lunar lusts”; the moon hosts a desire strangely bled of colour and vitality. As the poem nears its conclusion, its setting is likened to a “fossil virgin” and a “ ‘Crystal concubine’ ” (Lost LB 81–2). This moon encompasses the prehistoric, petrified remains of plants and animals, as well as a state of inviolate chastity, a newness and naïveté; Loy’s is a celestial object made of a substance so pure and transparent it is associated with prophetic powers, but is simultaneously akin to a “kept” woman sullied by her dependency on a man. This poem shows Loy at her oxymoronic best; in part, it is her fondness for surprising, even disorienting juxtapositions of high and low that defines her writing as modernist. These self-same practices arise time and again in Stories and Essays of Mina Loy, a volume that aims to broaden awareness of a writer and her era.

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