A Mad Lady's Garland by Ruth Pitter (1934)

This book is acknowledged to be the first of Ruth Pitter's truly mature work - I believe it is the earliest to supply pieces to her collected poems. I like her earlier work, but I do find richer satisfaction in this. There is more playfulness, more concentration of colour, a more individual voice, though there was a significant amount of all of that in what went before. Hilaire Belloc was her champion for the first twenty-plus years of her career. He says in his introduction that she has the rarest combination - 'perfect ear and exact epithet'. In some cases here this is very true; in some I would say that her ear for a good ending, so vital for the emotional bedrock-level impact of a poem, deserts her. The mostly brilliant Fowls Celestial and Terrestrial is a classic case where the pulsing architecture arches and twists in a growing edifice only to sputter out and flatline on ending. But when these quizzical and sometimes tart pieces really fly they are a joy. Her capacity to enter into states of consciousness which allow her to emulate the rhythms and voice of poetic styles long past is remarkable; her feeling for animals (the main theme here) and their contingencies of life is humorously wonderful. Her ability to relate that to human foibles and poignancy adds subtlety and further levels of weave to an already rich fabric.