Grimoire of the Entangled Thicket (The Chariot Poets: No. 4). SIGNED BY AUTHOR

Description

Original white glossy card covers, with black lettering and Colquhoun’s b/w illustration of a sea anemone (also to p. 19) to front cover. Stapled booklet. Some scuffing and marking to front cover. Light brown oil stain to most of rear cover, extending (and diminishing) through to front of volume, affecting most of pp. 19-20, about a half to a third of pp. 7-17, and bottom outer corner of earlier pages and front cover. Signed by author in pen to title page: ‘All good wishes from Ithell’. With loose cutting of the Guardian’s 1988 obituary of Colquhoun. Ithell Colquhoun (1906-1988), painter and poet, in 2025 the subject of a major retrospective at Tate Britain. Born in India, educated at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, and trained at the Slade, Coloquhoun was transformed by her discovery of surrealism during a visit to Paris in 1931. She established a studio in Paris during a stay in France when she encountered surrealist luminaries including André Breton and Matta, and on her return to England established herself as a member of the British surrealist movement, exhibiting with Roger Penrose and joining the English Surrealist Group. She remained loyal to surrealist techniques, including various forms of automatism, throughout her career, and in 1957 moved to Cornwall, where she engaged with the landscape and history of her adopted home through both art and writing, including visionary prose works in which ‘the borderline between a precise, sensitive rendering of reality and a plunge into the fantastic becomes imperceptible’ (ODNB). The 1973 Grimoire of the Entangled Thicket is the only collected publication of her poems, which ‘aim at re-establishing contact with the primitive energy which links letters, numbers, and vegetal cycles of life and death’ (ODNB). It collects eight poems linked to the Celtic calendar (much influenced by Robert Grave’s’ ‘Celtic tree calendar’) and eight b/w illustrations by Coloquhoun, some using ‘the automatic process know as décalomania’ (creating images through the transfer of wet paint or ink) to ‘evoke the spirit of various trees’ (from the one-page Author’s Foreword). Their subjects, among them ‘sea-anemone’, ‘tree-trunk’, ‘rock-pool’, and meditations on the Ogham alphabet, display Colquhoun’s intense, mystical involvement with the natural world around her, ‘at a time’, she says in her foreword, ‘when wasteful technology is threatening the plant-life (…) of earth and the waters’. Significant work by a major British surrealist, signed. Robust packaging. Tracking can be added to overseas orders on request. Used books are exempt from USA tariffs.