Used & Rare Poetry Books

Hardcover. New York, Henry Holt and Company, 1ST, 1929, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: Fair, 43 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Top edge of dust jacket torn and chipped. SIGNED AND NUMBERED 916/1000. Previous owner's name on front fly leaf.

Hardcover. New Hampshire, Bunker Hill Publishing, Inc., 1st Edition, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 36 pages. Hardcover. B/w illustrations throughout. Dust jacket unclipped, excellent. Black cover boards, red title on spine. Pages unmarked. Binding tight. Spine straight. In beautiful condition. A proper and modern Norse saga, written with all the power of Melville and Hemingway and a true story now retold in the ageless rhythms of blank verse, as irresistible as the beautiful and specially commissioned woodcuts of Mary Azarian.

Hardcover. London, Ellis and Elvey, 1st, 1890, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover 2 volumes octavo 7 1/2 x 5 1/4 inches- very handsomely leather bound in a simple half period blue morocco with marbled boards with gold letters and raised dentils, marbled endpapers, top edge gilt, xlii, 528, xl, 521 pages. Notes by William M. Rossetti. A fine set in a gorgeous binding. Previous owner's name on both title pages otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Middletown CT, Wesleyan University Press, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 445 pages. Clean.

Hardcover. Minneapolis MN, Milkweed Editions , 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. INSCRIBED BY JAMES on the title page. Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, The Milk Hours is an elegant debut that searches widely to ask what it means to exist in a state of loss. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Chatto and Windus, 1st, 1964, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. SIGNED BY PACK on the half tittle page. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin , 1st, 1912, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue publisher's cloth with titles and harp logo in gilt to front and spine, top edge gilt, on laid paper, 112 pages. The Philadelphia-born poet Florence Van Leer Earle Coates (1850-1927) came from a family of abolitionists and philanthropists. This mid-career volume was published in the same period she was regularly contributing to titles such as Atlantic Monthly, The Century Magazine and The Lippincott Magazine. Her family entertained various Roosevelt relatives at their Adirondak summer house. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. Franklin Center PA, The Franklin Library , 1st thus, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, full genuine brown leather binding, heavily gilt stamped with elaborate decorations and multiple rules. All edges gilt. Sewn in silk bookmark, marbled paper end-sheets and smyth sewn. Illustrated with drawings by Lloyd Bloom. A proven bestseller time and time again, Robert Frost's Poems contains all of Robert Frost's best-known poems-and dozens more-in a portable anthology. Here are "Birches," "Mending Wall," "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," "Two Tramps at Mudtime," "Choose Something Like a Star," and "The Gift Outright," which Frost read at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy." An essential addition to every home library, Robert Frost's Poems is a celebration of the New England countryside, Frost's appreciation of common folk, and his wonderful understanding of the human condition. Clean, bright copy.

Softcover. NY, Stone Street Press, 1st , 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, blue paper wrappers with illustrated label on front. SIGNED BY MCCORMICK on (C) page Lino cut Illustrations, calligraphy & translation by McCormick. #95 of 495 copies. Clean, bright copy.

Softcover. Lewiston ID, Confluence Press, 1st, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover. This chapbook is clean and unmarked in very good condition. Unpaginated. Limited edition of 500 copies.

Softcover. Palo Alto CA, Pacific Books, 1st, 1973, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 134 pages. Contains 78 poems of 71 poets. The 25th annual volume published in the Borestone Mountain Poetry Awards series. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, New Directions, 1st, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 296 pages. A collection of Antin's staggering, tightly controlled yet freewheeling improvisatory performance-poem talks. Clean, bright copy.

Softcover. NY, Four Way Books, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 66 pages. These poems map out a topography where global movements of diaspora and war live alongside personal reckonings: a house's foreclosure, parents' divorce, the indelible night spent drunk with a best friend "[lying] down inside a chronic row of corn." Here, her father's voice "is the stray dog barking / at the snow, believing the little strawberries grow wilder / against a field." In these pages, she points to Russia and Poland and Germany, saying, "It was / another time. My people / another time. The synagogues burn decades / of new snow." The brilliance of this collection illuminates the relationship between memory and language; "another time" means different, back then, gone and lost to us, and it means over and over, always, again. With this linguistic dexterity and lyrical tenderness, Hoffman's work bridges private and public histories, reminding us of the years cloaked in shadows and the years when there was light. Clean, bright copy.

Softcover. NY, Grove Press , 3rd pr., Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 214 pages. Cover price of $2.45, E-552, ISBN number on rear cover so post 1970. Clean copy. This is the 3rd printing of the original Mexico City Blues (242 Choruses) by Jack Kerouac, a long poem composed of 242 "choruses" or stanzas, which was first published in 1959. It has been the inspiration for multiple films and novels, and serves as a pillar of Kerouac's oeuvre.

Hardcover. Yokohama, Sumpusha Publishing, 1st, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 141 pages. INSCRIBED BY THE AUTHOR on the first title page. English text. Clean copy.

Hardcover. St Paul MN, Graywolf Press, 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 62 pages. INSCRIBED/SIGNED BY THE POET on the front fly leaf. The poems discuss a journey across the ocean, a veterans' cemetery, money, an abandoned collection of dolls, and a man who escapes from his prison cell to commit a murder. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Petersham MA, Tatlock Publications, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Poetry by the New England author. 93 pages including notes plus the author's biographic sketch. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Random House, 1st, 1955, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 204 pages, red cloth covers in an unclipped dust jacket with light darkening to edges and spine. INSCRIBED BY SPENDER to literary historian and critic Roger Shattuck: "To Roger/My guide through/ Cambridge and Casablanca/with a great many thanks/Stephen Spender/Cambridge 1955".

Softcover. Minneapolis, Coffee House Press, 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Unpaginated, number 100 of 300 copies SIGNED BY AUTHOR AND ARTIST, Susan Nees in the rear. Sewn into handmade heavy paper wrappers. Also inscribed on the half title page.

Hardcover. Boston, James R. Osgood & Co., reprint, 1872, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, embossed blue cloth with gilt stamping, 107 pages. Text edges stained red, title page in red and black. Previous owner's inscription on blank prelim page. Bright, tight copy.

Hardcover. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 1973, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 48 pages, hardcover with dust jacket. Minor edge wear, otherwise, very clean and tight.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 81 pages. SIGNED BY AUTHOR on title page. Light edgewear to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy.

Softcover. Santa Barbara CA, Capra Press, 1st, 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, Capra Chapbook Series No. 27, 50 pages. Small trade paper original simultaneous with scarcer hardcover issue. A collection of early poems by Ursula K. Le Guin, edited by Robert Durand and Noel Young, with a frontispiece portrait of the author by illustrator James Brunsman. Clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Dodd Mead, 1st, 1910, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardbound, 90 pages. 10 color plates and frontispiece by John Rae. Gold decorations on endpapers. White cover with blue sparkly spine and corners. Color illustration front cover and gold lettering on cover and spine. Spine and edgewear. Soiling to covers.

Softcover. Paris, Pierre Seghers, 1st, 1953, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 54 pages. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR ON HALF TITLE PAGE. Hand stamped #35 of 300. Maroon paper covers with paste down titles on spine and front cover. Clean, tight copy.

Softcover. Santa Monica, The Lapis Press, First Edition, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Non-paginated. Softcover with french flaps & light wear to edges. Previous owner's signature to front flyleaf. Pen marking to several pages in commentary sections. Poetry is clean & unmarked throughout. Black printed illustrations.

Hardcover. London, Rupert Hart-Davis, 1st, 1968, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 128 pages. Black and white cloth cover, slight wear to edges and corners. Dust jacket has minor edgewear. Previous owner's stamp on top edge. Illustrated by Jim Dine. Translated by Ron Padgett. Many b&w photographs and illustrations throughout. A bright, clean copy.

Hardcover. New York, Scribner, Armstrong, and Company, 1st US, 1872, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 282 pages, hardcover. A Hidden Life and Other Poems. Cloth boards with gilt lettering and design. Beveled boards. Slight tears to head of spine. Edgewear and bumping to boards. Rubbing to boards as well, but gilt is still relatively bright. Mild cocking to spine, binding still tight. Slight staining from bleed half title page to prelim page. Previous owner's inscription to prelim page. With tipped-in old timey bookmark. A bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, Arrow Editions, 1st, 1937, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, 146 pages. Hardcover. Previous owners bookplate on inside front cover. Light foxing to edges. Dust jacket with darkening, chipping along edges. Jacket now protected with clear plastic cover.

Hardcover. NY, Harper and Brothers, 1st, 1929, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Fair, Hardcover with fair dust jacket. Illustrated with woodcuts by Clare Leighton. Dj with large chunks gone, edgewear, tanning.

Hardcover. New York, John Lane Company, Limited 1st, 1915, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 168 pages, with frontispiece portrait of Brooke with tissue guard, introduction by George Edward Woodberry. Previous owner's signature on front fly leaf, minor corner and spine edge wear and fray, otherwise, very clean and tight copy.

Hardcover. New York, John Lane , 1st, 1918, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 82 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Corn colored cloth boards with gilt title on cover and spine. lightly soiled edges. Previous owners signature on front end paper.

Softcover. Cambridge MA, Yellow Moon Press, reprint, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, stapled green wrappers, 24 pages, two b&w illustrations. A reprint of the 1983 Firefly Press edition.

Hardcover. Reilly & Britton Co., 1st Edition, 1910, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 110 pages. Hardcover. Also included: "The Bells", "Annabel Lee" and "The Philosophy of Composition", an essay by Edgar Allan Poe. Gorgeous Color & B/W Illustrated Drawings by John Rea Neill, Cover boards bound in green cloth, with illustrated paste-on on front cover board. Previous owner's bookplate on verso of front fly leaf. Some wear and soil to covers. Top edge gilt. Tanning to edges and pages, doesn't affect text or illustrations. Binding tight. Spine straight. Previous bookstore proprietary stamp on page 21.

Hardcover. NY, Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, 1st, 1929, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover First Edition Blue cloth with gilt to the spine. The author's third work, his first assembled book with the assistance of Hart Crane. One printing only, of 1000 copies. INSCRIBED BY COWLEY on front fly leaf.

Hardcover. NY, Norton, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 112 pages. Stern's 12th collection is his first since winning the 1998 National Book Award for the new and selected This Time. The poems still rely on Stern's inimitable blend of coiled anger, love of life and raffish, on-the-outside-looking-in wit. Poem after poem reflects on what it means to have been a Jew, a Pennslyvanian, a nature-and-weather watcher, a world traveler and, for a longer time than many poets of his stature, an unknown writer during the middle of the last century: "If you can stand Strauss then so can I,/ oh filthy Danube, oh filthy Delaware, oh filthy Allegheny.// And anyone who never opened a Murphy bed/ night after night for seven years without ripping/ the sheet and had neither desk nor dresser can't walk/ in my shoes or wear my crocodile t-shirt." Stern's remembrances are not so much nostalgias as attempts to telescope the speaker's world and worldview through verse-talking, to test everyday language's ability to render his experiences to his liking, or at least his satisfaction.

Hardcover. NY, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1st, 1885, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, gray cloth with blue and gilt design on cover and spine. 184 pages, top edge gilt. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, E. P. Dutton & Co., reprint, 1885, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Embossed flexible leather covers with a string binding. Gilt script lettering on front. B&w frontispiece and many b&w engravinge throughout, 94 pages. Nice clean copy of this unusual binding.

Hardcover. Mrs. Clayton M. Richardson, 1st thus, 1946, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 77 pages, line illustrations throughout and gilt title on cover. Minor corner and edge wear, fading to parts of cloth otherwise tight. Poems reprinted from popular children's publications along with the drawings that accompanied them. no marking.

Hardcover. Evanston IL, Northwestern University Press, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. A portrait of Black America in the nineteenth century. Over the course of two decades, award-winning poet Patricia Smith has amassed a collection of rare nineteenth-century photographs of Black men, women, and children who, in these pages, regard us from the staggering distance of time. Unshuttered is a vessel for the voices of their incendiary and critical era. Smiths searing stanzas and revelatory language imbue the subjects of the photos with dynamism and revived urgency while she explores how her own past of triumphs and losses is linked inextricably to their long-ago lives. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Alfred A. Knopf, 1st, 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a dust jacket with light fading to spine. A collection of 16 poems by Meredith, all based on the fictitious painter Hazard. #66 of 100 copies numbered and SIGNED on a tipped-in prelim page. In addition, also INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on the front fly leaf. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Alfred A. Knopf, 1st, 1945, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, black cloth with gilt lettering and design on spine and front cover. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on the front fly leaf. Additionally with a note to the title page stating she has hand-corrected some 20 errors in the printed text, unique thus. An epic poem "on the lives of a young composer-aviator and his intimates and casual acquaintances the accumulated wisdom and lore of the world in which we live." Winner of the Yale Poetry Award. No dust jacket. Mildred Dodge Jeremy Ingalls was an American poet and scholar of Chinese literature. In 1943, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship to work on her major poem, The Thunder Saga of Tahi, this being the result. Spine gilt faded.

Hardcover. NY, Harcourt, Brace and Co, 1st, 1938, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth covers with gilt lettering on spine. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on the front fly leaf. Frontispiece illustration by Rockwell Kent. 1000 pages plus commentary in rear by John Crowe Ransom, William Carlos Williams and others. Previous owner's name on title page, gutter loose at title page. Rear hinge cracked. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Chicago, Herbert S. Stone & Company, 1st, 1898, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in the publisher's original paper covered boards. Title paste-down on front and back covers. Beautiful illustration in green on title page. This collection of 50 sonnets and poems was written by American poet, writer and philanthropist Helen Hay. The collection includes poems such as 'The Days', 'Throne and Altar' and 'In the Mist'. Helen Julia Hay Whitney (March 11, 1875 - September 24, 1944) was an American poet, writer, racehorse owner/breeder, socialite, and philanthropist. She was a member by marriage of the Whitney family of New York. Previous owner's signature on front flyleaf, otherwise a clean, bright copy.

Softcover. Brunswick ME, Shanti Arts , 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 121 pages. Poet J. R. Solonche adds The Book of a Small Fisherman to his impressive list of over thirty published poetry collections. His poems, says Chase Twichell, "are an extraordinary amalgam of wit, close observation, humor, and clear-seeing. Each one singles out and illuminates an ordinary moment-ordinary, that is, until the poet explodes into a miniature epiphany. Easy of access and frequently profound, J. R. Solonche's poems induce in me a state of delighted surprise."

Hardcover. New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press , 1st, 1972, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 68 pages. A tight clean copy.

Hardcover. Piermont NH, Bunker Hill Publishing, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. In this true modern saga, Olav Erikson and his son Martin pursue their destiny against a background of stark natural beauty. The author heard parts of this story years ago from the son's wife and has recreated the whole of their adventure in a narrative poem. With beautiful and specially commissioned woodcuts by Mary Azarian. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 426 pages. The most wide-ranging volume of the work of Europe's leading postwar poet. Paul Celan was born in 1920 in the East European province of Bukovina. Soon after his parents, German-speaking Jews, had perished at the hands of the Nazis, Celan wrote "Todesfuge" ("Deathfugue"), the most compelling poem to emerge from the Holocaust. Self-exiled in Paris, for twenty-five years Celan continued writing in his German mother tongue, although it had "passed through the thousand darknesses of death-bringing speech." His writing purges and remakes that language, often achieving a hope-struck radiance never before seen in modern poetry. But in 1970, his psychic wounds unhealed, Celan drowned himself in the Seine. This landmark volume includes youthful lyrics, unpublished poems, and prose. All poems appear in the original and in translation on facing pages. John Felstiner's translations stem from a twenty-year immersion in Celan's life and work. John Bayley wrote in the New York Review of Books, "Felstiner translates . . . brilliantly." Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, New Directions, 1st pbk., 1963, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 119 pages. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Cape Goliard Press/Grossman, 1st, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, A bright, clean copy in flax colored buckram, golden yellow enpapers, in a tan dust wrapper printed in dark blue, not price-clipped. This volume presents, for the first time in collected form, all the poems Charles Olson authorized for publication in his lifetime, from 1946 until his death in January, 1970, apart from the Maximus Poems sequence.