Published when Ida Affleck Graves was ninety-two, A Kind Husband is one of those books that makes literary chronology look slightly stupid.
Graves had first appeared with the Hogarth Press in 1929, published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, then continued writing across much of the twentieth century while largely disappearing from public view. This collection marked a remarkable late return: not juvenilia retrieved from a drawer, but poems still being made, alert to illness, age, sex, domesticity, memory and mortality.
Graves can move from convalescent wards, coffins and bodily decline to dogs, weather, lovers and comic indignity in a few lines, and her apparent simplicity often conceals something sharper underneath. The title itself carries that ambiguity: kindness, marriage, endurance and menace never sit entirely still. Here old age doesn't dissolve into either wisdom theatre or elegy. The voice remains curious, rude, amused, wounded and observant.
A strange and genuinely compelling late-career book, especially for readers interested in neglected modernist women, ageing, domestic life and the long afterlife of Bloomsbury-era literary culture.
Oxford University Press, Oxford Poets, 1994. First edition paperback. ISBN 0-19-282395-7. Light shelf and edge wear to covers, with minor handling marks; internally clean and sound. Very good used condition.
