THE COMPLETE POEMS

First UK edition, first printing. Original brown cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in dustwrapper. A near fine copy, the binding square and firm, the contents clean throughout. Previous owner's name and date neatly in ink to the front free endpaper. Light vertical crease to the cloth over the spine (without effect to the binding). Offset toning to the whole front endpaper and marginally to the pastedown. Not price-clipped (£4.00 net to the front flap). A nice, bright copy of the uncommon Faber edition.

Sometimes overshadowed his larger than life contemporaries, Randall Jarrell's poems have quietly endured and grown in stature since his death in 1965 (following a road accident generally accepted to be suicide). His fellow poet Robert Lowell, believed his friend ought to be compared with "the best lyric poets of the past. [...] His gifts [...] were wit, pathos, and brilliance of intelligence [,] qualities, dazzling in themselves, [and] often so well employed that he became, I think, the most heartbreaking English [sic] poet of his generation. Always behind the sharpened edge of his lines, there is the merciful vision, his vision, partial like all others, but an illumination of life, too sad and radiant for us to stay with long—or forget." He was also one of the century's great poet-critics, the first and best reader of a generation of poets, many of whom clearly loved and valued him. This posthumous Complete Poems includes Jarrell's own 1955 selection of poems with his notes, as well as his two final volumes, 'The Woman at the Washington Zoo' (1960), which won the 1960 National Book Award (jointly with Lowell's 'Life Studies') and 'The Lost World' (1965). In addition, the volume gathers the poems from five earlier books that he didn't choose for the Selected volume and a section of uncollected work. Of Jarrell and 'The Lost World', John Berryman wrote (in 'Dream Song' 121), "His last book was his best. His wives loved him. / He saw in the forest something coming, grim, / but did not change his purpose."