COLLECTED POEMS, 1943-1976

First edition, first printing. Original blue cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in dustwrapper. A very near fine copy, the binding square and firm, the contents clean throughout. A few light spots to the upper edge of the page block. In the dustwrapper, a little faded to the spine and with a few light surface marks. Not price-clipped (£3.25 to the front flap).

Vasko Popa was born in Grebenats, Northern Yugoslavia in 1922, and died in Belgrade in 1991. A selection of his poetry had been issued by Penguin in 1972 (also translated by Anne Pennington and introduced by Ted Hughes), but it was this 1978 collection that made the full range of Popa's work available to English readers for the first time. As Hughes writes in his generous introduction, Popa "is one of a generation of East European poets – [Miroslav] Holub of Czechoslovakia and [Zbigniew] Herbert of Poland are perhaps two others of similar calibre – who were caught in mid-adolescence by the war. Their reaction to the mainly surrealist principles that prevailed in Continental poetry in the inter-war years was a matter of personal temperament, but it has been reinforced by everything that has since happened, to their countries in particular and in some measure (more than ever before) to human beings everywhere. [...] The attempt these poets have made to record man's awareness of what is being done to him, by his own institutions and by history, and to record along with the suffering their inner creative transcendence of it, has brought their poetry down to such precisions, discriminations and humilities that it is a new thing." Published in June 1978, in an edition of 1000 copies. Sagar and Tabor note that part of the edition "was distributed without change in the United States by Persea Books [...]" (Sagar and Tabor B90).