Talking Bronco - 1946

London: Faber & Faber , 1946. 91pp, [p9]. Original publisher's salmon cloth boards lettered in gilt. With the original publisher's dust wrapper in darker orange and white. Some sunning to board ends, minor losses to wrapper at the frayed edges. Internally bright if a little foxed to the endpapers, with the ownership inscription of Henry Williamson dated 1956. A divisive figure throughout his career, Roy Campbell was a South African poet, critic, satirist and translator. Once touted as a rival to T. S. Eliot on the publication of his debut work The Flaming Terrapin, his reputation suffered in the years since for myriad reasons in both his Native South Africa and Europe. Terrapin was first recommended to publisher Jonathan Cape by T. E. Lawrence, who had seen an early manuscript copy. After the war he spent some time with literary group The Inklings, as well as with T. S. Eliot, who approached Campbell with a view to publish a new collection of his poetry. This was realised as Talking Bronco (1946), and marked Campbell's return to poetry after an eight-year publishing hiatus. It is predominantly a collection of satires. Over the course of his career, Campbell published more than twenty volumes of poetry, as well as translations and literary criticism, and two autobiographies. A friend of Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, Uys Krige, he was also highly regarded in his time by Jorge Luis Borges, Edith Sitwell, Henry Williamson, T. E. Lawrence. Henry Williamson (1895-1977), novelist and writer on natural history and the English countryside, is predominantly remembered as the author of Tarka the Otter (1927) for which he won the Hawthornden Prize. His wartime experiences on the Western Front having altered his life inexorably, he spent the remainder of his post-war life in Devon, Norfolk and Suffolk, writing naturalistic novels very much in the romantic tradition. T. E. Lawrence was a dear friend of Williamson, who published 'The Genius of Friendship', an account of their correspondence in tribute to him, six years after Lawrence's tragic death. . First edition. 8vo.