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Upper cover slightly marked, dustwrapper marked and slightly chipped; some creasing (in printing) at pp.17-22. The author's first solo verse collection, this copy from his library, with his autograph correction on p.15 (adding a word to line 12 of "The Statue in the Wood"). "Derek Stanford published in 1946 a joint book of verse with John Bayliss entitled A Romantic Miscellany. His verse has also appeared in many journals and anthologies, but this book is the first collection of his own poetry. He would describe himself as a neo-romantic somewhat influenced by French symbolism, and, figuratively speaking, would like to wed the Eiffel Tower of modern verse with the lily and the rose of romantic literature. The poets who have meant most to him as a poet are Darley, Arthur Symons, Apollinaire and T.S. Eliot" (publisher's blurb). Music for Statues was, recalled the author in his memoir Inside the Forties, "one of the last titles which Herbert Read accepted for the Broadway House Poetry series published by Routledge and Kegan Paul when the wartime boom in poetry began to abate. Various people who have been kind enough to read the poems in it have asked me, somewhat puzzled, the meaning of the title. I have told them that the statues are all those many persons with ears, like the statues of bronze or stone who cannot hear the music of the spheres. Perhaps this ironically worded forecasting was needlessly glum, as a number of these pieces appeared afterwards in anthologies, Geoffrey Grigson choosing eight of my poems for his [1949] anthology Poetry of the Present." Derek Stanford (1918-2008) survives, if at all, as a footnote in the lively pageant of Dame Muriel Spark's biography (Spark, who boosted Music for Statues, even wrote a poem on the subject), but surely deserves better. Robert Nye, reviewing his 1980 selected poems, The Traveller Hears the Strange Machine, wrote: "Derek Stanford is a minor poet . . . [but] within his limits . . .a very good poet indeed." He compared him to such "honest minor poets" as Ernest Dowson. "He has never won a literary prize. He will never be famous. He's written a few dozen lines quite likely to survive and give pleasure as long as English poetry is read, that's all.". Seller Inventory # 29M100757
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