literature poet

Softcover. Greensboro NC, University of North Carolina Press, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 108 pages, illustrated in color and b&w. Softcover exhibition catalog featuring the poet's collaboration with various artists like John Altoon, Donald Sultan, others. Includes a CD-ROM.

Hardcover. Saint Paul MN, Paragon House, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 231 pages. Nearly twenty years of letters beginning with the poet's encouragement of guidance, and the sharp critic's mentoring, developing into a sparring intellectual relationship discussing philosophies of literature and culture, and then mental dueling, and finally a rejection of one another. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, Archipelago Books, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover in pictorial wrappers, 171 pages. One of the most transcendent poets of his generation, Darwish composed this remarkable elegy at the apex of his creativity, but with the full knowledge that his death was imminent. Thinking it might be his final work, he summoned all his poetic genius to create a luminous work that defies categorization. In stunning language, Darwish's self-elegy inhabits a rare space where opposites bleed and blend into each other. Prose and poetry, life and death, home and exile are all sung by the poet and his other. On the threshold of immortality, the poet looks back at his own existence, intertwined with that of his people. Clean Copy.

Softcover. NY, Archipelago Books, reprint, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover in pictorial wrappers, 171 pages. One of the most transcendent poets of his generation, Darwish composed this remarkable elegy at the apex of his creativity, but with the full knowledge that his death was imminent. Thinking it might be his final work, he summoned all his poetic genius to create a luminous work that defies categorization. In stunning language, Darwish's self-elegy inhabits a rare space where opposites bleed and blend into each other. Prose and poetry, life and death, home and exile are all sung by the poet and his other. On the threshold of im/mortality, the poet looks back at his own existence, intertwined with that of his people. Clean Copy.

Hardcover. US, University Of Chicago Press, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 228 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on title page. Light edgewear to dust jacket with light soil to rear cover.

Hardcover. Chapel Hill NC, University of North Carolina Press, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 277 pages, illustrated in b&w and color. The putto (often portrayed as a mischievous baby) appears frequently in the art and literature of Renaissance Italy. The "spiritelli" embody a minor species of demon, neither good nor bad. This book discusses the manifestations of the putto-spiritello in 15th-century art and literature. It offers parallel interpretations of two works: Botticelli's "Mars and Venus", a painting in which infant Satyr-putti appear as the panic-inducing spirits of the nightmare, and Politian's "Stanze", a poem in which masked cupids appear to the hero in a deceiving dream. The text concludes with an examination of the functions of such masks in the poetry and public masquerades sponsored by Lorenzo de'Medici and in Michelangelo's scheme for the decoration of the Medici Chapel. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Philosophical Library, 1st US, 1948, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, green cloth covers, 265 pages. B&w frontis. portrait. Previous owner's long inscription on front fly-leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. New York, Henry Holt & Company, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, 332 pages. Light shelf-wear to dust jacket with slight crease to rear cover, else a clean, tight copy.

Softcover. St. Louis, Washington University Libraries, 1st, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 32 pages in stapled wrappers. An exhibit of printed materials and manuscripts drawn from the Modern Literature Collection of Washington University. Illustrated. Clean copy.

Softcover. St. Louis, Washington University Libraries, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover. First edition. From an edition of 1500 copies. Small quarto. illustrated wrappers. 40 pages. With many facsimiles of pages from James Merrill manuscripts, correspondence, etc. Includes short essays on several different aspects of his work as well. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1st, 1966, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 516 pages. A biography of a brilliant literary figure, a poet, critic, political and social reformer of mid-nineteenth century America. Clean copy.

Softcover. Durango CO, Logbridge-Rhodes, 1st, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 150 pages, b&w illustrations. Poems by Wright, with letters, interviews, memoirs, elegies, a chronology, and bibliography. Light fade to spine, otherwise clean copy.

Softcover. NY, George Braziller, reprint, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 437 pages. New Zealand's preeminent writer Janet Frame brings the skill of an extraordinary novelist and poet to these vivid and haunting recollections, gathered here for the first time in a single volume. From a childhood and adolescence spent in a poor but intellectually intense railway family, through life as a student, and years of incarceration in mental hospitals, eventually followed by her entry into the saving world of writers and the "Mirror City" that sustains them, we are given not only a record of the events of a life, but also "the transformation of ordinary facts and ideas into a shining palace of mirrors." Frame's journey of self-discovery, from New Zealand to London, to Paris and Barcelona, and then home again, is a heartfelt and courageous account of a writer's beginnings as well as one woman's personal struggle to survive. Small patch of tanning to bottom corner of last 80 pages. Otherwise clean.

Softcover. privately printed, 1921, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, program for the Memorial services held for the writer/naturalist at the Nest in Riverby, April 2, 1921. A selection of Bible passages, poetry and Burrough's own writings. Two tipped b&w plates. Folded gray wrappers with a string tie, 24 pages printed on gray charcoal paper. Very good, clean.

Hardcover. London , Royal Academy of Arts , 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 272 pages, without dust jacket. Like new in publisher's shrink-wrap. Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) was one of the 20th century's leading exponents of collage and assemblage. A connoisseur of an astonishing array of subjects, Cornell's captivation with bygone imagery encompassed astronomical charts and geographical maps, Italian and Spanish Old Master paintings, historical ballet, early film, literature, poetry and ornithology. Most iconic among his works are his box constructions-microcosmic curiosity cabinets-filled with once-precious fragments that he collected in thrift shops in his native New York. Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust is a landmark publication examining this remarkable work. It brings together some of Cornell's most compelling assemblages and box constructions (including Medici slot machines, soap-bubble sets and animal habitats). The contributors raise questions about Cornell's artistic processes while drawing parallels with historical modes of inquiry such as connoisseurship, exploration and classification.

Hardcover. UK, Oxford University Press, 2nd pr., 1926, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pale orange cloth with title on spine label. Former copy belonging to COUNTEE CULLEN (1903-1946), with his signature on the front fly leaf. Cullen was an American poet, novelist, children's writer, and playwright, particularly well known during the Harlem Renaissance. 248 pages, b&w frontis. Small paper scars to front endpapers, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 281 pages, b&w illustrations. "For, Lo! We live in an Iron Age--In the age of Steam and Fire!" wrote a poet mesmerized by the engines that were transforming American transportation, agriculture, and industry during his lifetime. Indeed, by the nineteenth century fire had become America's leitmotif--for good and for ill. "Keeping the flame" was deadly serious: even the slightest lapse of attention could convert a fire from friendly ally to ravaging destroyer. To examine the cultural context of fire in "combustible America," Margaret Hazen and Robert Hazen gather more than a hundred illustrations, most never before published, together with anecdotes and information from hundreds of original sources, including newspapers, diaries, company records, popular fiction, art, and music. What results is an immensely entertaining and encyclopedic history that ranges from stories of the tragic "great fires" of the century to fire imagery in folktales and popular literature. Dealing more with technology than with fire in nature, the book provides a vast amount of information on fire manipulation and prevention in urban life. Hazen and Hazen discuss the people who worked with fire--or against it. Founders, gaffers, blacksmiths, boilers at saltworks, and housewives knew how to "read" a fire and employ it for their purposes. A few dedicated investigators inquired about the scientific nature of heat and flame. And firefighters gradually progressed from "bucket brigades" to "using fire to fight fire" with the newly invented steam engine. The colorful stories of these Americans--the risks they took and the rewards they received--will fascinate not only social historians but also a broad audience of general readers. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Cincinnati, Poe & Hitchcock, 1st, 1860, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 762 pages, b&w illustrations. Cloth and leather covers. Some foxing to pages, edgewear to covers, some pages dog-eared, else a very nice, tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, Frederick A. Stokes, 1st thus, 1890, Hardcover, 3/4 decorated white cloth with gilt stamped decorative pattern. Vignette edition with engraved frontispiece and 100 illustrations by Thos. McIlvaine. An Oriental romance, originally published in 1817, consisting of four narrative poems connected by a prose section. Small blank label on inside front cover, otherwise a tight, clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Columbia University Press, 1st, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 263 pages. Clean copy.

Softcover. Princeton NJ, Ontario Review Press, reprint, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 384 pages. An intimate account of the sudden rise to literary fame and long, inexorable decline of Delmore Schwartz, a complex and deeply troubled man who was keenly aware of his own inner contradictions, as revealed by his correspondence. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, W W Norton & Co , 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. In this compelling new study of one of the century's most memorable poets, Jon Stallworthy has produced an outstanding full-scale biography of Louis MacNeice, drawing on the testimony of family, friends, lovers, and MacNeice's extensive unpublished correspondence and papers. Stallworthy, whose Wilfred Owen was described by Graham Greene as "one of the finest biographies of our time," has produced another no less remarkable life of an equally haunting figure. MacNeice's mother died when he was seven and Stallworthy shows how his imagination transmuted her ghostly presence, and the powerful presence of his father, into an elemental opposition structuring most of what he would write - from anguished indictments of his native Ireland to poignant love poems.

Hardcover. NY, The Macmillan Company, 1st Ltd. Ed., 1921, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a tan dust wrapper with black lettering, 111 pages. A tight, lovely first edition of Brown's first book, a study of the works of the just-deceased and little-known New England poet and essayist Guiney (1861-1920). The frontispiece, a head and shoulders wood engraving of a young woman (presumably Guiney) wearing a crown of laurels, is signed boldly in pencil just below the image by famed wood engraver TIMOTHY COLE (1852-1931). ALSO INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR BROWN on the front fly leaf. Number 11 of 100 special copies.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 2025, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 497 pages. "The critic Adam Plunkett expertly teases out the many meanings of Frost's poems . . . Blending biography and criticism, Plunkett shows how the circumstances of Frost's peripatetic life gave rise to some of his most successful poems. As in the best critical biographies, Plunkett does not merely track down real-world inspiration for a given work. Rather, he brings together Frost's personal life, literary sources, and publication history to enrich our understanding of the poems, then uses the poems to enhance our understanding of the life. The result is a thorough, elegant, and, at times, surprising study of Frost, who emerges as a remarkably complex poet and a compelling but complicated man." -Maggie Doherty, The New Yorker. Clean copy.