FRAME, Janet. The Pocket Mirror: Poems. London: W. H. Allen, 1967.

Octavo. Original teal cloth boards. Original price-clipped dust jacket. [vi], 121 pp. First UK edition. Published the same year by George Braziller, New York.

Janet Frame (1924–2004) is remembered internationally chiefly as a novelist and memoirist — the author of Owls Do Cry (1957), Faces in the Water (1961), and the three-volume autobiography beginning with To the Is-Land (1982), which Jane Campion adapted into the acclaimed 1990 film An Angel at My Table. But Frame's own account of her literary priorities places poetry, not prose, at the centre: she began writing poems at the age of nine, continued composing them without pause for the whole of her working life, and described poetry in interview as "the highest form of literature, because you can have no dead wood in a poem." Despite this lifelong devotion, The Pocket Mirror, published in 1967, remains the only collection of poems Frame published during her own lifetime — everything else she wrote in the form, and there was a great deal of it, stayed unpublished until the posthumous The Goose Bath appeared in 2006, edited by Bill Manhire from the extraordinary cache of poems Frame had kept, quite literally, in a bathtub used for storage rather than bathing, which gave that later volume its title.

The poems collected here were, by Frame's own account, assembled somewhat hastily and submitted to her American publisher George Braziller — a fact that belies the considerable craft and consistency of the collection that resulted. Written predominantly in free verse and in the first person, the poems attend to the ordinary textures of daily observation — beaches, town scenes, the view from a morning window — alongside more searching meditations on death, war, and, in a recurring and distinctly period-specific image, the anxiety of nuclear annihilation figured through the mushroom cloud. The result reads less like a poet's occasional sideline and more like the concentrated, disciplined expression of a sensibility that had, in fact, been rehearsing itself in poetic form within Frame's novels for over a decade already — her prose fiction, as several critics have observed, is itself intensely lyrical and metaphorical, poetry compressed into narrative form.

The Pocket Mirror won the New Zealand Literary Fund Award for Achievement in 1969, and has remained continuously in print in one edition or another ever since — an unusual longevity for a single volume of verse, and testament to the depth of Frame's readership beyond her novels. The collection's biographical weight is considerable: Frame wrote it in the years following her own long and harrowing period of psychiatric institutionalisation — misdiagnosed with schizophrenia, she spent close to a decade in and out of mental hospitals, narrowly escaping a scheduled lobotomy only when her first book won a major literary prize — and the poems carry, beneath their attentive descriptions of ordinary life, the hard-won clarity of a writer who had fought her way back to the vocation she had always intended to pursue.

Near fine. Dust jacket price-clipped, some minor rubbing to edges and some small chips to spine foot. Contents near fine, some mild foxing along edges. Overall, a bright and lovely copy with an excellent dust jacket and clean internals.

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Catalogue Number: HH000138