SELF-PORTRAIT IN A CONVEX MIRROR

First edition, first printing. Signed by the author. Publisher's original quarter blue cloth over olive-green paper-covered boards lettered in green to the spine. In the dustwrapper designed by Jacqueline Schuman. A very good copy, the binding square and firm, the contents clean. Mild spotting to endpapers and to the fore-edge of the page block (lighter spotting to top and bottom edges), with a few spots to the margins of early and late pages. The dustwrapper, toned to flaps and with a few spots to the verso, is otherwise in very good shape, the colours sharp and bright. Not price-clipped ($5.95 to the upper corner of the front flap).

Signed and dated by the author in blue ink to the title page (the date, 12 May 1975, was three days before publication). With 'Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror', Ashbery unexpectedly joined something like the mainstream of American poetry. The book was awarded all three major American poetry awards, the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The long title poem owes its genesis to the poet's experience of seeing Francesco Parmigianino's (1503-40) small painting, 'Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror', at the Vienna Kunsthistoriches Museum in 1959, in the company of his lover at the time, the French poet Pierre Martory. The 552-line poem, written over a decade later,"reconstitutes" Helen Vendler writes, "that original [...] experience – in which a love-relation, self-recognition, and aesthetic admiration were entwined – and integrates with it the information he has subsequently acquired about the portrait", fusing in the process the "Rome where Francesco / Was at work during the Sack [...] / Vienna where the painting is today, where I saw it with Pierre in the summer of 1959; [and] New York / Where I am now, which is a logarithm / Of other cities [...] alive with filiations, shuttlings." The painting and the experience of it become "the model by which [Ashbery] draw[s] his own self-portrait as a twentieth-century poet in intimate colloquy with a dead artist and a contemporary or future reader."'Self-Portrait' was the first of Ashbery's collections to be published in the UK (Carcanet, 1977; a selection had been issued by Jonathan Cape in 1967). The volume is dedicated to Ashbery's bibliographer, lover, and eventually husband, David Kermani. (Helen Vendler, 'Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery', Princeton, 2005; Kermani A22).