Mina Loy was born in London in 1882 to a Hungarian father and English mother. She had many talents – novelist, painter, playwright, but it was Mina Loy the poet that I first discovered, falling under the spell of her wonderfully titled collection ‘The Lost Lunar Baedeker’ (a Baedeker is an old term for a guidebook).
These poems were ambitious in form, full of dreamlike juxtapositions and daring in terms of their explicitness. She seemed to take delight in shining a light on hidden areas of psychology and sexuality.
I was still at University then, and the modern poetry course I had signed up to, never very popular, had thinned out to just me. I was discussing the motif of light that reappears throughout these poems, when the Professor took a book down from the shelf, opened the page and showed me Mina Loy’s lamps. It was as if they had jumped straight off the pages of the poems – a lamp in the shape of a celestial globe, a trio of stars, a ship sailing across the ocean.
At one point in her remarkable, bohemian life she had opened a lamp shop in Paris to sell her creations!
