A Mad Lady's Garland

London: The Cresset Press, 1934. Very Good. 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".