The Song of the Sun: Collected Writings by Leah Bodine Drake

• Edited by David E. Schultz

• 770 pages

• Fifteen original interior illustrations by Jason C. Eckhardt
• Cover design by Daniel V. Sauer, incorporating a painting by Leah Bodine Drake's mother

• ISBN 978-1-61498-266-1 Limited cloth: 200 copies only
• ISBN 978-1-61498-267-8 trade paper 

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American poet Leah Bodine Drake (1904–1964) attained celebrity with the publication of A Hornbook for Witches (1950), the first book of poetry issued by the legendary small-press publisher Arkham House. But that slim volume is only the tip of the iceberg of her writing.

Drake published only one other book of verse, The Tilting Dust (1955), and an anthology, The Various Light (1964), coedited with Charles Arthur Musès. She had assembled another volume of poetry, Multiple Clay, but it was never published. This volume gathers, for the first time, the entirety of Drake’s poetic output—more than 360 poems, including hundreds of uncollected and unpublished poems. Drake published her work in such distinguished magazines as the Atlantic Monthly and the New Yorker. Most of her poetry is not weird, but her fantasy and horror verse did grace the pages of Weird Tales, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and other venues.

In addition, this volume contains four of her short stories (two of which were published in Weird Tales), an assortment of her essays and reviews, and letters to August Derleth, Anthony Boucher, Joseph Payne Brennan, and select others.

The editor, David E. Schultz, has consulted Drake’s own scrapbooks of her poetry, allowing for chronological arrangement of her versem presenting a thorough account of Drake’s life and a comprehensive bibliography of her published and unpublished work.

Drake’s well-crafted poetry draws upon myth, legend, and history to underscore her deep understanding of human life and emotions. This definitive compilation will establish Leah Bodine Drake as a significant voice in twentieth-century poetry.

PRAISE FOR LEAH BODINE DRAKE

“one of the great poets of our time” . . . “poet of the century.”—Alfred Dorn

“[A Hornbook for Witches is] a gem in all senses of the word. Some of the poems are as magical as Walter de la Mare . . .”—Clark Ashton Smith

Miss Drake’s lines sing, and her subjects are never very far from that enchantment which many feel to lie at the heart of real poetry. . . . [T]here is more poetry in these pages than is to be found in a dozen of the coterie poets of our day. . . . I recommend This Tilting Dust for its delightful images, for its often memorable flights of fancy, and for a quality which, for want of a better term, can best be called luminosity.”—August Derleth

“The work of Leah Bodine Drake is particularly notable for its warm and enticing imagery. . . . she is not merely a sensualist. Her enormous range of subject-matter includes myth, legend, folk and fairy tales, human Interest features and the history of every period. [. . . H]er finest power is attained in her verses of closer metrics and greater technical discipline.”— George Abbe

“observant, imaginative, evocative”—Anthony Boucher

“[A Hornbook for Witches] set a standard of excellence never equaled . . . before or since.”—Stanley McNail