Observations
Marianne Moore
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
<p>Marianne Moore's <i>Observations</i> stands with T. S. Eliot's <i>The Waste Land</i>, Ezra Pound's early <i>Cantos</i>, and Wallace Stevens's <i>Harmonium</i> 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.</p><p>Presented with a new introduction by Linda Leavell, the author of the award-winning biography <i>Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore</i>, this reissue of <i>Observations </i>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&#8212;to them she was "a rafter holding up . . . our uncompleted building." Equally forceful for subsequent generations,...</p>