Description

Wesleyan University Press, Published 1962. Hardcover, 96 pp.; 21 cm; First Edition; Wesleyan Poetry Program 14. In Good+ condition with a Good dust jacket. Gray cloth boards, author's name in black and title in blue on spine; mild shelf wear, small bumps to lower corners. Binding tight. Offset toning to endpapers; pages lightly toned, otherwise unmarked. Laid in: torn page 73 from an unnamed periodical, with photograph of Dickey and review of his Helmets alongside Roethke's The Far Field and Walcott's Selected Poems; and torn leaf from Harper's Magazine, June 1966, printing Dickey's poem The Bee on both sides, with illustrations signed Osborn, folded, toned. Illustrated dust jacket, designer's credit Boultinghouse on front panel, $3.50 on front flap. Spine sunned to tan, rear panel browned along edges; 3/4 inch tear at foot of rear panel, orange-brown spot at lower left of rear panel, dark spots on front panel, small nicks and light creasing along edges. Now in an archival quality (removable) Brodart cover. Dickey's first solely authored book, following a selection of his poems in a shared collection of three poets. Thirty-six poems in four sections, eleven of them first printed in The New Yorker, including The Lifeguard, The Heaven of Animals and In the Tree House at Night. Dickey kept 25 of the 36 in Poems 1957-1967. Front flap quotes his statement on his work: "My principal aim is to take myself and my reader beyond the point where the writing is thought of as literature to where it will become a part of experience." Contents: Section I: The Lifeguard; Listening to Foxhounds; A Dog Sleeping on my Feet; The Movement of Fish; The Heaven of Animals; A Birth; Fog Envelops the Animals; The Summons; In the Tree House at Night; For the Nightly Ascent of the Hunter Orion over a Forest Clearing; The Rib; The Owl King. Section II: Between Two Prisoners; Armor; In the Lupanar at Pompeii; Drowning With Others; A View of Fujiyama After the War; The Island. Section III: Dover: Believing in Kings; To His Children in Darkness; A Screened Porch in the Country; The Dream Flood; The Scratch; Hunting Civil War Relics at Nimblewill Creek; The Twin Falls; The Hospital Window. Section IV: The Magus; Antipolis; The Change; Autumn; Snow on a Southern State; To Landrum Guy, Beginning to Write at Sixty; Facing Africa; Inside the River; The Salt Marsh; In the Mountain Tent.