GEOGRAPHY

First edition, first printing. Original black cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in the illustrated dustwrapper. A very near fine copy, the binding square and firm, the contents clean throughout. A touch rubbed to the lower spine tip. In the very good dustwrapper, with a few small nicks to edges and some light surface marking. Not price-clipped (25/- or $4.00 to the front flap).

In autumn, 1965, Ed Dorn moved to England following an invitation from the poet and scholar Donald Davie to join the English faculty he was creating at the University of Essex. Since 1961, Dorn had published two volumes of poems in New York and, in 1964, a volume with Tom Raworth's Matrix Press in London. In 1965, he published two volumes, 'Idaho Out' and 'Geography', with the newly founded Fulcrum Press, which would quickly become synonymous with the most adventurous English and American poems during the 1960s and 70s. (The Press folded in 1974 when, reportedly, most of the unsold books were pulped). In the evocative, compressed autobiography printed on the front flap of 'Geography' (one of the three inaugural Fulcrum publications), Dorn notes that all its poems were written following a move to Pocatello, Idaho in 1961. "I thought this place was arbitrary, almost man made. My own attraction was that I could focus my own subjective sense as geography on that place." The book was issued in an edition of 1,000 copies, printed on Glastonbury pure white antique laid paper at the Press of Villiers Publications, London, and bound by Adams and Harrison, Biggleswade. It is dedicated to Charles Olson.