FROM an ex-co-editor:

May I add my congratulations to those of Editor Susan Sweeney to Matthew Roth

for ID-ing the Ford poem!

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It raises some intriguing side-thoughts:

1) The Ford collection appeared over two years after VN had left the US, so he must have seen it on its newspaper or magazine original publication.

2) The poem evokes, perhaps, the barn episode with Hazel and family?

3) Note the Kinbote lines at the end of his Commentary on line 71:

"The black trunk [perhaps containinng K's plan of the Onhava Palace]...stands on another brown or brownish even larger one, and there is I think a stuffed fox or coyote next to them in their dark corner."

This is the only fox (see Ford's poem) in PF. K sees it in Shades' ancestral home stashed away "on the top of the big black trunk, opposite the old mangle, in a niche of the little corridor leading to the so-called fruit room." Could Shade as a youth shot the [now stuffed] fox as it was raiding a barn? Maybe Hentzner's?