NEW COLLECTED POEMS

First edition, first printing. Original fawn paper-covered boards lettered in brown to the spine, in dustwrapper. A fine, bright copy, presenting as unread, the binding square and firm, the contents clean throughout. In the fine dustwrapper. Not price-clipped (£30.00 to the front flap). A lovely, sharp copy.

When, in 1935, T. S. Eliot introduced a Faber and Faber Selected Marianne Moore, he stated his "conviction, for what it is worth [...], that Miss Moore's poems form part of the small body of durable poetry written in our time." Moore was never prolific, but she was a perfectionist, frequently revising her poems (the jacket of this volume refers to her "restless, seldom-ceasing, decade-spanning revision") which has made it famously difficult to establish stable and reliable texts of the poems. Moore's own 'Complete Poems' of 1967 ("I am tempted simply to call her our greatest modern poet" wrote John Ashbery when it was published) remained the standard text until quite recently, and remains in print, but it left out too much and offered little information about when particular poems were written and how they had evolved. For this new edition Heather Cass White presents the poems in their published order while "honouring the complex textual lives of the poems." A generous introduction and meticulous notes complete what will surely remain the definitive edition of these extraordinary poems.