My Life Had Stood a Loaded Gun

Emily Dickinson published fewer than a dozen poems in her lifetime. She spent most of her adult life in her family home in Amherst, Massachusetts, rarely leaving, corresponding intensely with a small circle of readers, and writing — in secret, in fascicles she stitched herself — some of the most original poetry in the English language. This Penguin Little Black Classic gathers her essential poems: ‘I heard a Fly buzz — when I died’, ‘Because I could not stop for Death’, ‘My Life had stood — a Loaded Gun’.

Dickinson’s compression is extraordinary. She takes the large subjects — death, eternity, consciousness, love, the nature of time — and renders them in poems so short they barely occupy a page, and yet leave the reader with the sensation of having covered enormous distances. Her dashes, her unconventional capitalisation, her slant rhymes: all of these are not eccentricities but tools, precisely deployed to create pauses and resonances that standard punctuation cannot achieve.

One of the great poets of the English language, in a beautiful pocket collection. Published by Penguin.