The Arctic Ox

1964

Brasch PS3525 O5616 A7; Every effort has been made to trace copyright ownership and to obtain permission for reproduction. If you believe you are the copyright owner of an item on this site, and we have not requested your permission, please contact us at special.collections@otago.ac.nz

London: Faber and Faber

‘If I, like Solomon…/ could have my wish – / my wish…O to be a dragon…’ So begins the first line in Marianne Moore’s The Arctic Ox, a collection of poems that appeared in 1964, the first for her in seven years, since her successful Like a Bulwark (1957). Moore was a great lover of nature and was a frequent visitor to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In this volume, Moore not only poeticises chameleons, jellyfish, a giraffe, and the Arctic Ox (or goat), but also baseball, which was another of her passions. In 1951, she won the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Award for her Collected Poems (1951).