SELECTED POEMS

First UK edition, first printing. Original black cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in the dustwrapper designed by Stephen Raw. A very near fine copy, the binding square and firm, the contents clean throughout. There is the merest bumping to the lower outer corners. In the bright, clean dustwrapper, a touch rubbed to spine tips and corners. Not price-clipped (£16.95 to the front flap). An attractive copy.

James Schuyler, with Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch, was part of what became known as the New York School of Poets, a group that was nevertheless unified by friendship rather than any similarities between the work of the individual poets. After a couple of years living on the Italian island of Ischia as W. H. Auden's secretary, Schuyler returned to New York where he worked as a bookseller while sharing an apartment with Ashbery and O'Hara (like them, he wrote a substantial amount of Art criticism during these years). This selection, the first volume of Schuyler's work to be published in the UK (it was issued two years earlier in the US), contains over a hundred poems drawn from the poet's five collections, including the Pulitzer Prize winning 'The Morning of the Poem' (1980). "This long overdue collection confirms what many of us have long suspected: that Schuyler is simply the best we have" (John Ashbery).