Fjord Mists

Renée Vivien (1877-1909), born Pauline Tarn in London, chose exile, French, and poetry against her century. Crowned "the Sappho of 1900", she wrote about desire, grief, and female sovereignty, refusing the consolations of sentiment or respectability. Dead at thirty-two, she did not have time to reach her full potential, yet she left behind forever-shaped, finely cut verses, some of breathtaking beauty, a body of work both classical and incendiary, innovative in form and radical in vision.Her poems do not ask to be rediscovered. They wait, intact, for readers strong enough to meet them.