Loose Canons 1:
Eleanor Wylie: Wild Peaches

The first in an ongoing series of pamphlets celebrating and reintroducing poets and poems unfairly neglected or forgotten

February 2025

This title, in a much slighter form, was first issued in 2014 for inclusion in the CODEX portfolio Alchimie du verbe. We printed an extra fifty copies and sewed them into wraps for distribution from the press and as gifts. When we decided to revive the series in 2024, we re-edited this initial item, retaining its original format for the series and substantially increasing its contents from six poems to eighteen.

Elinor Wylie is an admirable example of the poets whose work will be included in the series. She was widely read and critically admired during her life, her work bringing a new sharpness of tone and occasionally satirical edge to American poetry. Her imagery is pungent and striking, her subjects intriguingly outside the usual, and her voice commanding without being strident. The title poem adds a pertinent, direct perspective to the American sense of relation to the natural world: where in earlier American poetry nature writing had tended to a presumed human domination – as opposed to a stewardship – or to a mystical inclination which often transformed natural elements into mere metaphysical phenomena (especially in the Transcendentalists), in ‘Wild Peaches’ the speaker is only human, and sees nature for what it is, in sensual acceptance:

I love those skies, thin blue or snowy gray,
Those fields sparse-planted, rendering meagre sheaves;
That spring, briefer than apple-blossom’s breath,
Summer, so much too beautiful to stay,
Swift autumn, like a bonfire of leaves,
And sleepy winter, like the sleep of death.

She has sardonic moments too, as in ‘A Crowded Trolly Car’, when she notes that

Supple hands, or gnarled and stiff
Snatch and catch and grope;
That face is yellow-pale, as if
The fellow swung from rope.

She sets her poems against her own character – self-aware, brave, and defiant. In sum, she is an admirable and deeply entertaining companion.

In masks outrageous and austere
The years go by in single file;
But none has merited my fear,
And none has quite escaped my smile.

Loose Canons One: Elinor Wylie : Wild Peaches is published in an edition of 120 copies. It is printed in Van Dijck, hand-set by Lea Sánchez Milde on Zerkall Cream laid paper with Rivoli for display, printed by her and sewn into wraps of St-Armand Canal paper. 16 pages. C$120.

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