Telling

"Truth's nature is to fill a place that belongs to it when the place becomes cleared of a usurping occupant. It slips into place, then, with a quiet of natural fitness, perfectly not-astounding in the rightness of its being there".
(Note 4, p. 149)

For Laura (Riding) Jackson, two decades of intense poetic dedication finally revealed poetry itself to be a "usurping occupant". It was a long time before she felt ready to publish this post-poetic testament, the book she called a "personal evangel". The work of a poet who renounced poetry in mid-life because it hampered the way to something further in language, "The Telling" stands central to her work and unique in the intellectual history of the twentieth century.

The language-quality of "The Telling" is distinctive; so too is the author's vision of human fulfilment as attainable through truth-speaking. The core-part of the book, in 62 numbered sections, is followed by a "Preface for a Second Reading", and in turn by the confiding "Some After-Speaking: Private Words". This concentric series of extending considerations – linguistic, literary, social, spiritual – completes the book, while leaving its thought open to further exploration.

Michael Schmidt considers this rich and rewarding work in his introduction.