Occasional Poems

Buffalo: Breed & Lent, 1869. First Edition . Hardcover. Very Good. Octavo. Buffalo: Breed & Lent, 1869. First Edition. Frontis daguerreotype portrait of the Rev. Dr. Lord. Octavo, [vi] + 141 pp. Dark aubergine cloth, gilt cover title and design, top edge gilt. Moderate wear at spin ends and corners, light wear elsewhere; front hinge starting. Very Good binding, with contents fine. See scans. A moody, strange and quite rare little book of poems, sounding at times oddly new age-ahead-of-its-time-ish, by the Rev. Dr. John C. Lord, an accomplished former minister at the Central Presbyterian Church in Buffalo, NY. Frontispiece daguerreotype, tipped in opposite the title page, shows the Rev. Lord looking every bit the Mayor of the Munchkin City in his pomade curls. While many of the poems are dedicated to a place or an event in a place - Niagara Falls, Buffalo, Toledo - and others are in memoriam after the death of a parishioner or a parishioner's child, others - such as "The Thunder Storm" - are stark and in places almost nightmarishly mood- oriented, and in that way, and in contrast to the others, without cognitive point. Even more disconcerting are several which sound as though they arose from an almost Nostradamian precognitive dream - examples being: "The Atlantic" ('Lost Titan of the stormy sea, long waited for by weary eyes...Say Giant Stemmer of the Deep, where hast thou wandered from thy way ? 'Mid polar ice art thou asleep...'), "Kings and Thrones Are Falling" (Old Germany is waking like a cyclop from his wine; and dark his brow with hatred, and red his eye with wrath), and "The Returning Pestilence", which has the ominous sound of an as-yet unfulfilled prediction about a peril from the east. Precognition-oriented, somewhat creepy, though no doubt accidentally. For the collector of the unintentionally eerie. Extraordinarily scarce, possibly unique among available books. Please see scans. l49n