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FIRST EDITION. 8vo, pp. viii, 75, (1). Terracotta cloth, black stamped title labels, lettered and framed in gilt, to spine and upper board. First and bottom edges untrimmed. A few stains to boards, faint offsetting to endpapers, a few fox spots to untrimmed edges, else, clean and tidy. In the original dust jacket: spine sunned, small loss to head of spine, toned, a few chips, creasing to top edges. Very good/ good+ A lovely copy of Pitter's fourth collection, which first brought her to public attention. The British poet and craftswoman "first attracted public attention with A Mad Lady's Garland (1934), a brilliantly crafted work reflecting her early exercises, encouraged by [A. R.] Orage, in the art of pastiche"; another contemporary, John Stewart Collis, recalled "[h]er remarkable range, and the subtlety of her oblique lyrical assault" (ODNB). The collection features poems voicing a coffin-worm ("The Worm unto his love"), earwig, 'the virtuous female spider', a performing flea and church mouse, amongst others, who "speak so classically, with so exquisite an artifice, that I am stayed to listen to them" ('AE' (George William Russell), rear panel blurb). Pitter (1897-1992) was a perpetual prize-winner across her writing life: from the Hawthornden Prize in 1937 for A Trophy of Arms: Poems 1926 1935 through the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1955 (a first for a woman) to her appointment as CBE in 1979 for her contributions to English literature, she was justly honoured. As Thom Gunn observed: "Ruth Pitter is the most modest of poets, slipping us her riches as if they were everyday currency". Seller Inventory # 2473
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