I am pleased to announce the availability of a new catalogue, “Sweet Singers (American Verse, 1806-1964),” a miscellany of 183 items available as a PDF via email. (I do not plan to offer a paper version of this catalogue.)
The authors included in this list range from Chauncey Lee, whose 1804 paraphase of the entire book of Job was intended to divert tender minds from the temptations of German Romanticism, to May Margaretta Duffee, whose 1945 epic Thou Shalt Not Covet treats of the triple murder of an Ohio family at the hands of a hog farmer down on his luck.
A number of the works issue from small presses around the Midwest, and while the aesthetic merits of many of these authors may be open to question, their zeal to follow the muse is not. As the bibliographer of fugitive verse Wynot R. Irish has noted, “the free spirit back of these queer poems is one that a nation will suffer to die at its peril.”
If you would like a copy sent along, please contact me directly via email — garrett [at] bibliophagist [dot] com [making the appropriate substitutions to the email address as necessary].
