THE PANGOLIN AND OTHER VERSE

First edition, first printing. Printed by the Curwen Press, Plaistow, in an edition of 120 copies. Original paper-covered boards lettered, ruled and decorated in black and blue. Issued without dustwrapper. A very good copy, the binding square and firm, the contents clean throughout. The boards, slightly toned and dusty, are lightly rubbed to edges, corners and folds, with a small abrasion and faint blue horizontal mark to the upper portion of the front panel. Altogether, a very well preserved copy.

This beautifully produced slim volume, issued in an edition of just 120 copies, belies its greater significance. Heather Cass White, in her invaluable edition and study of 'The Pangolin and Other Verse' goes as far as to claim that the volume, containing only five poems, "represents the culmination of the work [Moore] produced in the four years preceding its publication, and as such marks the high-water mark of [her] entire poetic career". The book followed 'Poems' (1921), 'Observations' (1924), and 'Selected Poems' (1935). The latter volume (an unusual undertaking for a poet near the start of her publishing career), published simultaneously in the UK and US, was put together in close collaboration with T. S. Eliot at Faber and Faber, who provided the introduction ("My conviction, for what it is worth, has remained unchanged for the last fourteen years: that Miss Moore's poems form part of the small body of durable poetry written in our time"). Having worked closely with Eliot on the arrangement of the Selected Poems, Moore again turned to Eliot as she considered her book for the novelist and poet, Bryher's (Annie Winifred Ellerman Bryher 1894-1983) Brendin Press. Founded in 1935, the press, in addition to publishing the periodical 'Life and Letters', issued a series of carefully designed limited editions of contemporary poetry. On May 31, 1935, Moore sent Eliot a manuscript, asking "[i]f these four poems were to be printed together, would you be the friend to them you were to the poems in my book, and advise me as [sic] the order in which I ought to place them?". By the time Eliot replied, agreeing to the order and suggesting that one of the poems, 'The Pangolin', should provide the book's title, Moore had composed a fifth poem, 'Jamestown' (which became 'Virginia Brittanica'), and had contacted her old friend, George Plank, to ask if he would provide illustrations. She wrote to Plank of being "follied into another effort – a kind of commentary on Virginia. [...] It deals with Jamestown church-tower ruin and table tombstones, and Captain John Smith's coat of arms, (a Turk's heads [sic] and an ostrich with a horseshoe in its beak), dwarf box-edged flower beds, ivy arbors and lead statuary, saddle horses, hounds, raccoons, owls, French furniture, and so on; the pomegranate and African violet also." The final ordering of the poems as a sequence of four poems entitled 'The Old Dominion', followed by 'The Pangolin' alone, stressed what White refers to as the "decisively human focus" of the volume, a kind of coded "commentary on American history and art". (White demonstrates how later orderings and revisions of the poems diminished and defused this polemical edge.) Randall Jarrell later wrote of the title poem that it "may be her best poem; [...] certainly one of the most moving, honest, and haunting poems that anyone has written in our century." Prompted by an article in the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History and a small bronze pangolin at the Museum of Modern Art, it is one the poet's great animal poems. Linda Leavell notes that "whereas earlier poems idealized the animal's dignity against human greed and shortsightedness, here the pangolin is shown to resemble humans in its postures and its daily toil." Plank's finely detailed illustrations, like latter-day emblems, beautifully complement the poems. (Linda Leavell, 'Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore', London, 2013; Heather Cass White, 'A-Quiver with Significance: Marianne Moore, 1932-1936', Victoria, 2008). (Abbott A5).