“Robert Duncan’s long-awaited meditations on H.D., modernism, and esoterica,” the recently published The H.D. Book, continues to garner favorable notice. Erik Davis provides an extensive review in the Feb/Mar 2011 issue of Bookforum under the heading of “The Shadow Catcher,” which can be read here.
Duncan cautiously praises the much-mocked Madame Blavatsky, recognizing her enormous Theosophical books—declared to be revealed wisdom but actually "midden heaps" of quotations and unacknowledged borrowings—as textual collages avant la lettre: "From what has been disregarded or fallen into disregard, genres are mixed, exchanges are made, mutations begun from scraps." This could, in part, describe The H.D. Book as well, a diffuse and heterogeneous matrix whose heaps of obscure references can, as with Blavatsky's books, become tiresome and overwhelming.
Perhaps to some, but not to others.
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