"One of the great, shattering, open-hearted legacies of twentieth-century English poetry."---Edward Hirsch
"A superb volume."---Harold Bloom
"The poems delve as deeply into the contradictions of the human heart as Hardy's finest novels."---Dana Gioia
"Often lost in the abundance of Hardy's larger collections, these poems about Emma deserve their own space. In this little jewel-box of a book they have found it."---Eamon Grennan
After the death of his wife, Emma, in 1912, the great English novelist an poet Thomas Hardy began to write a seris of poems about her. Although the couple had long been estranged, Hardy was suddenly enthralled all over again and became obsessed with memories of their love, as well as with remorse over what had gone wrong between them. This sequence, "Poems of 1912-13," has grown in stature in the century since it was written and is now considered to be one of his most accomplished works. Hardy continued to write about Emma for the rest of his life, and Unexpected Elegies includes a selection of the best of these other poems about Emma. The insightful introduction by the noted Hardy critic Claire Tomalin places the poems in a biographical context.
Thomas Hardy's famous sequence of love poems, published as a book for the first time.
