Book excerpt: "Façade, an entertainment of words and music, was first performed in public on 12th June 1923 at the Aeolian Hall in London -- to the alarm and consternation of the audience and the execration of the critics. Today Façade is recognized as a key work of the modern movement. An yet, after countless performances, it is the rhythms of Walton's music that are generally familiar, rather than the poems themselves. This new edition, published to mark the centenary of Edith Sitwell's birth, is the first sustained attempt to interpret the poems in their own right. Inspired by a sympathy for Edith Sitwell's life and work, Pamela Hunter -- who played the part of Edith on stage and television -- presents the full text of the 21 poems, followed in each case an illuminating 'scene' evoked by the poem and a brief commentary. Entering the private world of Edith Sitwell's childhood memories and associations, as revealed in the family autobiographies, she offers the reader a new understanding of this twentieth-century masterpiece. The text is enhanced by etchings of the seventeenth-century Commedia dell'Arte engraver Jacques Callot, which Sacheverell Sitwell compared to the 'vein of fantasy' in his sister's poetry." -- Provided by publisher