THE MORNING OF THE POEM

First edition, first printing. Original quarter black cloth over pale blue paper-covered boards, lettered in silver to the spine with the author's ornamented initials in blind to the front panel. In the dustwrapper illustrated with a drawing by Anne Dunn. A fine copy, the binding square and firm, the contents clean throughout. In the dustwrapper, with a few short closed tears to the upper edge of the front panel and a small area of loss (c. 1 x 0.5 cm) to the lower edge. The spine is a little faded with some light rubbing to folds. Not price-clipped; $10.95 to the upper edge of the front flap (with the ghost of a price-label to the lower edge). A nice copy.

'The Morning of the Poem', winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1980, consists of three parts. The first two ('New Poems' and 'The Payne Whitney Poems') are comprised of a number of Schuyler's perfectly formed lyrics (including a longer memorial to W. H. Auden); the third, however, contains the single long (sixty page) title poem, described on the jacket as "a letter, an autobiography, and [a] fable about the fresh sources of [Schuyler's] poetry. The poet, spending a summer in his childhood home in western New York, writes to a painter friend in Manhattan. His attention shuttles between country and city, from his boyhood to his New York life to the demands of his days at home, his hours of writing. His verse letter superimposes sender and receiver, poet and audience in an intimacy that transfigures its often painful memories: the death of dear friends, the desertions of lovers, family scenes, long stretches in hospitals." The poem stands alongside Schuyler's fellow New York School poet and lifelong friend John Ashbery's 'Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror' (1975), another great, long autobiographical poem addressed to a painter, and likewise the title poem of a Pulitzer Prize winning collection.