Revelling grandly into vice
Dropping crooked into rhyme.
Slipping through the stitch of virtue

Djuna Barnes is best known for her 1936 novella Nightwood. While recognised primarily as a prose writer, her work has arguably had more influence on poets. T.S. Eliot and Marianne Moore, for instance, were self-proclaimed fans of her writing. In his introduction to her most famous work, Eliot wrote: `Nightwood will appeal primarily to readers of poetry... it is so good a novel that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it.' Moore remarked, `reading Djuna Barnes is like reading a foreign language, which you understand.' Few people, however, know that Barnes also wrote poetry. Carcanet are publishing a collection of her verse in the Fyfield series this September, which I introduce, entitled The Book of Repulsive Women. The poems were originally published in journals and magazines such as The Dial, The Little Review, Vanity Fair, the All-Story Cavalier Weekly and Smart Set. Some of the poems were then included in the 1923 collection of her writing, A Book. The majority of the poems, however, have not been republished since their first appearance, and a small number of them were never published at all, languishing in manuscript form in the Barnes archive at the University of Maryland until recently. As a collection these poems are extremely diverse: since they were written between 1911 and the 1980s, considerable change and development in style and influence are inevitable. The early poems ...