Observations

Poems

Marianne Moore

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9780374226862
• eBook ISBN: 9780374713614
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

"How wonderful to have Observations as it was when it first appeared . . . as strange and new and enchanting as we remember it." —John Ashbery, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet
Marianne Moore's Observations stands with T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Ezra Pound's early Cantos, and Wallace Stevens's Harmonium as a landmark of modern poetry. But to the chagrin of many admirers, Moore eliminated a third of its contents from her subsequent poetry collections while radically revising some of the poems she retained. This groundbreaking book has been unavailable to the general reader since its original publication in the 1920s.
Presented with a new introduction by Linda Leavell, the author of the award-winning biography Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore, this reissue of Observations at last allows readers to experience the untamed force of Moore's most dazzling innovations. Her fellow modernists were thrilled by her originality, her "clear, flawless" language—to them she was "a rafter holding up . . . our uncompleted building." Equally forceful for subsequent generations, Observations was an "eye-opener" to the young Elizabeth Bishop, its poems "miracles of language and construction." John Ashbery has called "An Octopus" the finest poem of "our greatest modern poet." Moore's heroic open-mindedness and prescient views on multiculturalism, biodiversity, and individual liberty make her work uniquely suited to our times.
Impeccably precise yet playfully elusive, emotionally complex but stripped of all sentiment, the poems in Observations show us one of America's greatest poets at the height of her powers.
"It is really the best of Moore in one portable volume." —Ange Mlinko, award-winning author of Difficult Ornaments

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Notice
• Introduction by Linda Leavell
• Editor’s Note
• To an Intra-Mural Rat
• Reticence and Volubility
• To a Chameleon
• A Talisman
• To a Prize Bird
• Injudicious Gardening
• Fear Is Hope
• To a Strategist
• Is Your Town Nineveh?
• A Fool, a Foul Thing, a Distressful Lunatic
• To Military Progress
• An Egyptian Pulled Glass Bottle in the Shape of a Fish
• To a Steam Roller
• Diligence Is to Magic as Progress Is to Flight
• To a Snail
• “The Bricks Are Fallen Down, We Will Build with Hewn Stones. The Sycamores Are Cut Down, We Will Change to Cedars.”
• George Moore
• “Nothing Will Cure the Sick Lion but to Eat an Ape”
• To the Peacock of France
• In This Age of Hard Trying, Nonchalance Is Good And
• To Statecraft Embalmed
• The Monkey Puzzler
• Poetry [1924]
• Poetry [1925]
• The Past Is the Present
• Pedantic Literalist
• “He Wrote the History Book”
• Critics and Connoisseurs
• To Be Liked by You Would Be a Calamity
• Like a Bulrush
• Sojourn in the Whale
• My Apish Cousins
• Roses Only
• Reinforcements
• The Fish
• Black Earth
• Radical
• In the Days of Prismatic Color
• Peter
• Dock Rats
• Picking and Choosing
• England
• When I Buy Pictures
• A Grave
• Those Various Scalpels
• The Labors of Hercules
• New York
• People’s Surroundings
• Snakes, Mongooses, Snake-Charmers, and the Like
• Bowls
• Novices
• Marriage
• Silence
• An Octopus
• Sea Unicorns and Land Unicorns
• Notes
• Index
• A Note About the Author
• Newsletter Sign-up
• Contents
• Copyright