Observations

Miss Moore was a constant reviser (and remover) of her own work, so this republication of her 1924 collection, the one that made her name as a Modernist great alongside Eliot, Pound, Williams, and Stevens, is a real resurrection. And to me, having read her rarely, it's a revelation. Funny and precise (her precision is what makes her so funny), indirect sometimes but never impenetrable, she makes you want to walk around inside the (to quote this book's most quoted line) "imaginary gardens with real toads in them" that her mind constructs. There are real toads here, but also elephants, chameleons, snakes, mongooses, monkeys, rats: a whole menagerie. Imagine Wallace Stevens and Ogden Nash had a love child, and it was an octopus.