Rococo, a poem

The second of only three volumes of poetry to be published by Dunning during his lifetime and since. A Detroit native, Dunning (1878-1930) moved to Paris in 1905 where he dedicated his time to only a small group of poems, composed in the style of the late Victorian era, publishing his first collection of poems Hyllus: A Drama in 1910 (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head). Around 1924 Ezra Pound ‘discovered’ Dunning, a recluse and an addict, and ensured his publishing in the journals of the day; I have read even that EP supplied Dunning with drugs, which, considering Pound’s mansarde et potage, one might believe. After Dunning received the Helen Haire Nevinson Prize from Poetry, A Magazine of Verse in 1925 the literati of the Left Bank began to heatedly debate Dunning’s poetry. The push for vers libre, as had been happening for 20 years, had left the public finally numb to any vers à la Victorien; Dunning’s advance of a style yet older struggled to be received, though it reads with a precision worthy of the Ancient Mariner. This book was the inaugural volume of The Black Manikin Press, one of the key expatriate presses of Paris in the 1920’s later to print Anaïs Nin, D. H. Lawrence, Djuna Barnes, Henry Miller and more. No. 80 of 500 copies all printed on Holland, the first fifty not for sale, with three illustrations by Howard Simon. Signed by Dunning on the limitation page and by Simon under the frontispiece. Spine mottled with a small break at top (nothing lost); light fading to the edge of the boards; endpapers browned spilling over to adjacent blanks where cut short; stock otherwise fine throughout. No bibliography has been composed for Dunning.…