The Miraculous Season delivers a gorgeously defiant portrait of a poet most of us have never known. As the editor notes in the book’s introduction, if you have heard of V. R. “Bunny” Lang, the Boston-based poet and playwright who died in 1956 at the age of thirty-two from Hodgkin’s disease, it is likely from your familiarity with her appearance in several poems by Frank O’Hara including “V. R. Lang,” “A Party Full of Friends,” “A Letter from Bunny,” and “A Step Away From Them.” “My darling / it would have been no sacrifice / to give my life / for yours,” O’Hara wrote of her, celebrating and mourning Lang for years after her death. For devoted readers of O’Hara, as well as those interested in rewriting narratives about mid-century iterations of the New York School, a new book of Lang’s poetry is a long-awaited and significant event. Lang and O’Hara were dear friends who, as he writes in “V. R. Lang: A Memoir,” “sounded each other out for hours over beers, talking incessantly. We were both young poets and poetry was our major concern.”

Yet in the commentary on Lang (and there is not much), the major concern is less her poetry and more her spectacular, sometimes extravagant organizational presence within the avant-garde community around the Poets’ Theatre in Cambridge, which she helped to found. The novelist Alison Lurie’s memoir of Lang, which results in an oddly unflattering depiction, exemplifies this imbalance. For instance, Lurie describes how Lang once dressed the cast for a play by Cid Corman in comedic all-pink outfits as a snub for Corman’s refusal to attend rehearsals. Corman stormed out of the performance, taking with him any support for the theater that he might have garnered. Such an anecdote now reads as a humorous feminist subversion of the male-dominated experimental art scenes of the 1950s, but Lurie portrays it as unduly vengeful, an example of Lang’s easily triggered capacity for “undying enmity.” In Lurie’s estimation, Lang’s relationship to her poetry was equally stubborn and melodramatic: “Bunny would sit up to read something, exclaim, ‘No, no, no!’ crumple it into a ball and throw it at the empty fireplace.” Lang just couldn’t make things easy for herself, Lurie suggests, either as a woman or a poet. She even admits to being suspicious that Lang used makeup to exaggerate the physical symptoms of her illness for performative effect at a poetry reading. Without a book published during her lifetime, these projections of Lang as an ill-fated eccentric have demarcated her limited reception. Relegated to little more than “a canny versifier” playing “mother figure to our best male poets,” as composer Ned Rorem wrote of her, a full and more equitable representation of this convention-defying poet has long been needed.

The Miraculous Season, published early this year by the UK-based Carcanet Press, delivers this renewed edition of Lang’s poetry, building positively on the two collections of Lang’s writing that were assembled posthumously—The Pitch, privately printed in 1962, and V. R. Lang: Poems & Plays, published by Random House in 1975. Though these books brought Lang’s work into circulation for the first time beyond her publication in little magazines, both editions include the same forty-eight poems, an editorial choice that suggests a limited and definitive selection. As Lurie writes in her memoir of Lang, which acts as the introduction to the Random House edition, “Everything she wrote contained wonderful lines and fragments; almost nothing was complete.” Lang was brilliant, we’re told, but didn’t finish much. The implication is that what was deemed complete following Lang’s death—a process undertaken by her husband Bradley Phillips, whom she married at the end of her life, along with friends of Lang’s and input from O’Hara—is wholly accounted for in the available books. However, there are moments in Lurie’s memoir that tease a more capacious archive. Working to assemble a manuscript after her diagnosis with cancer, Lurie describes a frantic scene in which “beds and the floor were covered with Bunny’s poetry for years past, all typed on tissue sheets of onion skin paper.” The image of Lang surrounded by typescripts makes one wonder what other versions of her work might exist.

Over fifty years after the last publication of her work, poet and scholar Rosa Campbell has assembled The Miraculous Season as an accurate measure of the textures and variousness of Lang’s poetry. It is a spectacular work of scholarly commitment and editorial attention that challenges Lang’s status as “a footnote to the rise and rise of the New York School of poets, a curio.” For the first time, Campbell’s project gives us a more complete selection of Lang’s poetry by reproducing the majority of the poems from the posthumous collections and, most importantly, adding over a hundred poems selected by Campbell from Lang’s papers at Harvard’s Houghton Library. The book is fantastic both because it features so many previously unpublished poems, presenting a wholly novel version of Lang as a poet, and because it restores many of the poems from the posthumous collections to Lang’s original formatting, including reintroducing missing stanzas. This combination of restoration and recovery is a testament to Campbell’s extraordinary labor uncovering, absorbing, and honoring Lang’s poetry on its own terms. Following Lang’s death, O’Hara hoped that “gradually that clear image of herself which is her work will be the solo image, a beautiful image, faithful to the original.” With The Miraculous Season, Campbell has fulfilled O’Hara’s wish.

Consider the poem that Campbell calls Lang’s “magnum opus,” “Poems to Preserve the Years at Home.” Alongside her plays Fire Exit and I Too Have Lived in Arcadia, it is one of her best works, a sprawling nine-section poem about Lang’s identity as a poet and how one manages to survive, in both public and private, in the midst of dying. Swerving between wit, rage, vulnerability, and playfulness, the poem begins in the choreographed social architecture of a cocktail party with an awkward introduction—“This is Miss Lang, Miss V. R. Lang, The Poet, or / The Poetess…”—before Lang interjects, chastising the speaker for characterizing poetry as “an employment” rather than “a private religion.” “Who’s that over there?” the poem breezily continues as she cuts from the veneer of social performance to narrate a series of anxieties and refusals.

Full of a reflective anguish amplified by the drudgeries of unfinished daily responsibilities—“I put something here, I had something to do, // Someone to telephone, some letter to answer”—Lang admits “God I am so tired.” Her resources as a poet are strained, “There is only the black center in my head / To reconstruct, to ache, to take dictation,” and the poem concludes with a knotted consideration of what it means to share one’s life at the end of that life: “I never once thought about death / Before I started to die.” As Lang confesses, “I told you everything before you slept […] / And you had only listened till I told you.”

A testament to its importance and distinctiveness in Lang’s oeuvre, “Poems to Preserve the Years at Home” appears as the last poem in V. R. Lang: Poems & Plays and in The Miraculous Season. However, in Campbell’s edition the poem expands from nine sections to fourteen, gains a new order for those sections, and adds lines cut from the earlier published version, a set of editorial transformations that dramatically widen the poem’s tone and scope. Using Lang’s typescripts from her archive, Campbell also reintroduces caesuras, makes subtle spatial realignments, and removes punctuation from many end-stopped lines, all of which unleash the poem’s more openly experimental original form. The effect of reading it in this restored version is a startling joy, giving us “new” lines like “I refuse to be a monument” and “I wish you disaster, nothing permanent” that further animate Lang’s power and wit while bestowing a version of textual integrity that brings readers closer to Lang’s vision. Far from simply “an unwavering disciple of Auden,” as O’Hara biographer Brad Gooch pinned her, Lang’s poems under Campbell’s care are animated by their own forceful beauty and strangeness, “An underground of seasons where the light like paint / Twitched where it touched us, and flaked down,” as she writes in “The Pitch.”

At other times in The Miraculous Season two iterations of a poem are presented back-to-back, usually with extraordinary differences, to record what Campbell calls “Lang’s recursive tendency.” The undated drafts Campbell encountered in Lang’s papers—and there are many more, she reports—disallow a chronological ordering and complicate a clear sense of finishedness among versions. One of the repeated poems in The Miraculous Season, “How to Tell a Diamond From a Burning Baby,” appears in Poems & Plays in yet another iteration completely different from these two, suggesting Lang experimented with the serial use of titles. Though we cannot be sure which poem with that title Lang might have preferred, Campbell takes this ambiguity and turns it into an editorial strength, honoring Lang’s process, as O’Hara writes, of “typ[ing] her poems over and over, sometimes 40 times, sinking into them.” “Not to finish becomes the challenge,” Lang writes in “Poems to Preserve the Years at Home.” With this interest in generative incompleteness in mind, Campbell modestly notes in the introduction that she is “less interested in presenting a definitive version of Lang’s poetry, than in revivifying it, opening up each poem and agitating its surface once again.” The surfaces that we get, lit up by formal effects that animate Lang’s theatrical levity, are marvelous in themselves, as in these examples:

There is also a persistent sense of the tragic alongside Lang’s playfulness, a need to “recognize my loss” that manifests in considerations of mortality. References to death, and especially suicide, lead to some of the most poignant entanglements in the book, subjects that Lang’s health made it impossible to disregard. As she asks in “The Girl Who Wanted to be a Tree,” an allusion to Daphne’s transformation: “Who can be sorry for this desolate dead girl?” Lang’s bluntness is an invitation into considering death’s complexities, and her allusions—including to Hamlet’s soliloquy on suicide, as in the last example below—disallow simplistic takeaways.

One finds oneself productively stuck in Lang’s enjambments (“You have to turn / Become”), reading and re-reading her unraveling of the distinction between “nowhere” and “there,” and marveling at the pressure she puts on a word like “care.” Campbell’s care for Lang’s work and legacy, her critical generosity and attention to textual efficacy grounded in sustained archival research, elevates The Miraculous Season to an ideal example of how to assemble such a project. It’s rare to find a book of selected poems for a poet for whom so little work is in circulation, and for that book to be composed mostly of uncollected and unpublished poems, which makes such a project a considerable challenge. What is the version, or versions, of Lang that will come through? Campbell gives us a poet in all her prismatic performativity and despair, all her tonal leaps and lyrical peculiarities, both youthful and dying, whose work is full of suffering and anger and being utterly satisfied with, as she writes, “that marvelous sensation / Of falling into place with all one’s wits working.” The Miraculous Season is dynamite—and Bunny Lang is back.