TERRY STREET

First edition, first printing. Signed by the author. Original black cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in dustwrapper. A fine copy, the binding square and firm, the cloth and gilt sharp, the contents clean throughout. In the very near fine dustwrapper, a touch faded to the margins of the pink rear panel and the merest rubbing to spine tips and corners. Not price-clipped (15s / £0.75 net to the front flap). An attractive copy of the author's first collection.

Signed and dated ("22 iv 77") by Douglas Dunn in black ink to the title page. In his Observer review of Terry Street, Ian Hamilton described Terry Street as "one of the most promising first books I've read for some time [...] offer[ing] more convincing sketches of at least the surfaces of humdrum urban living than one can find in any current poet except Philip Larkin." It was Larkin who helped to bring Dunn's poetry to the attention of Charles Monteith at Faber and Faber: "You may be interested to know that the Eric Gregory Committee (on which I sit) is giving £400 to Douglas Dunn, who is a small muttering bearded Scotsman of 26 studying at this University. [...] I believe [he] has some poems in with you at present, though he mutters so that I can never be quite sure what he is saying. [...] I showed his submissions to Day-Lewis, too, and he liked them, or so he said." (2 April 1968) In a letter to the poet, Richard Murphy, the following year when 'Terry Street' was in proof stage, Larkin writes of the poems, "well, I shoudn't know how to defend them, but I find them very likeable" (high praise from Larkin), and following the book's publication in October, he writes to C. B. Cox that "We have a new Hull poet now, name of Douglas Dunn: his 'Terry Street' has just come out from Faber's. [...] 'The Listener' called him 'the best poet since Seamus Heaney', which is like saying the best Chancellor since Jim Callaghan." ('Selected Letters of Philip Larkin', ed. Anthony Thwaite, London, 1992).