DAY BY DAY

First UK edition, first printing. Original tan cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in dustwrapper. A fine copy, the binding square and firm, the contents clean and bright throughout. Compete with the dustwrapper, fine except for the usual fading to the spine. A very nice copy.

'Day by Day', Robert Lowell's final collection, was published in the United States a few weeks before the author died in September, 1977. This posthumous UK edition was issued the following year. Like the three books that preceded ('History', 'For Lizzie and Harriet' and 'The Dolphin', all published in 1973) 'Day by Day' is unflinching in its autobiographical candour. As Helen Vendler wrote in her review of the book,"He has largely given up one of the most solacing aspects of conventional lyric—that transcending of past and future in favour of an intense present moment of love or grief, or happiness. Lowell forces us to read the emotions of the moment in the knowledge of emotions past and anticipated. Nothing is unshadowed; nothing is forgotten; no moment but reaches out to another on the farther shore."