World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
CLOSED FOR SUMMER.
RE-OPENING 01.02.24
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Please note: The bookshop is closed until February 1, 2024.
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after this date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 3 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund, exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
2023, English / French
Softcover, 16 pages, 17 x 26 cm
Published by
Editions Lutanie / Paris
Small Press / New York
$38.00 - In stock -
'Poems' presents four unpublished poems by American writer and actress Zoë Lund (1962—1999), written in the 1980s. An incandescent voice emerges, revealing the might, sincerity, and precision of her expression, as well as her vulnerability and defiance in the face of death. This is the first publication dedicated to her work.
Translated into French by Stephanie LaCava and Manon Lutanie, and presented in a bilingual volume (English, French), the poems are introduced by Stephanie LaCava, who retraces their genesis and examines the personality of their author: “She is unsure of her identity, but hints at certain proclivities: action as the only true form of activism (sustained readiness to strike); a taste for contradictory characters (strength exists where there is also cowardice); romance. [...] Uninterested in mute beauty, Lund wanted to write and produce her own projects. In a news clipping from 1983, titled ‘Young Political Film- maker Shooting at Mount Holyoke,’ there is a striking picture of Lund ‘working on a film about the radicalization of a young woman,’ per the caption. The article talks of her ‘uncompromising idealism’ and feelings about the naïveté of both American liberals and leftists. Three years later, in 1986, ‘Touchstone Levity’ was written, and [...], the same year, “Opium Wars.” The latter speaks to Lund’s interest in drugs (she had a taste for heroin and would die of heart failure at thirty-seven).” [publisher's note]
Zoë Tamerlis Lund (1962—1999), also known as Zoë Tamerlis and Zoë Tamerlaine, was an American author, screenwriter, director, actress and model born in New York in 1962. At a very young age, she showed talents for music and composition. She is also a bright student with a penchant for political activism. She left school at 15. As an actress, she made her debut in Abel Ferrara's film, Ms. 45 (1981). From 1980 to 1985, she was the companion and collaborator of the filmmaker, critic and activist Édouard de Laurot – author in particular of a film on Malcolm X, Black Liberation (1967). Throughout the 1980s, she starred in several feature films and series, including Larry Cohen's Special Effects and Miami Vice . In 1986, she married Robert Lund. She is the author of the screenplay for Bad Lieutenant (1992) by Abel Ferrara, in which she also stars and through which she addresses her heroin addiction. She has written numerous screenplays for films and television series, including the first treatment of New Rose Hotel (1998). She is the writer and director of a short film, Hot Ticket (1996), in which her character says: "That which is not yet, but which must be, is more real than that which is only be. » She died in Paris in 1999, at the age of 37, of a cardiac arrest due to cocaine consumption, leaving behind a large number of novels, short stories, essays and unpublished screenplays.
2023, English
Softcover, 168 pages, 10.5 x 8 cm
Published by
Hanuman Editions / US
$25.00 - Out of stock
Bread and Water
Eileen Myles
First published by Hanuman Books in 1986, Bread and Water is the debut short story collection by the renowned poet Eileen Myles, assembling six stories with an autobiographical flavor, of being a queer, working-class poet with a penchant for mischief. Stories include: "Light Warrior", "21, 22, 23…, "Merry Christmas Mr. Title", "Bath, Maine", "Bread and Water", and "Everybody Would Go Play Cards at Eddie and Nonie's".
Eileen Myles (b. 1949) is an American writer, poet, artist, teacher, and playwright. They are the author of more than twenty books, including Sappho's Boat, Chelsea Girls, Afterglow, and For Now.
From the first series redux of Hanuman Books, the legendary and cult series of chapbooks that were printed in southern India and published out of the storied Chelsea Hotel in New York City between 1986 and 1993. Founded by American curator Raymond Foye and artist Francesco Celemente, Hanuman Books was dedicated mainly to the extreme deconstructive edge of the countercultural poetic, musical, and artistic currents of the 1960s and 1970s, spanning the era of the Cold War, the AIDS crisis, the Harlem Ballroom scene, the Beats, Warhol's Factory etc. Hanuman Books sought to marry the folk-minimal-artisanal with the cutting edge, playfully marketing their books as ‘secret’ documents of an avant-garde subculture, meant to be passed on covertly at street corners just as millenarian chapbooks of medieval times were supposed to have been. Printed in India, the small format is meant to mimic the chapbook form of the Hanuman Chalisa (a folk compendium of chants to the Hindu god Hanuman, sold very cheaply in the bazaars of India) that made them perfect for slipping illicitly into any pocket. Redux editions edited by Shruti Belliappa and Joshua Rothes.
2024, English
Softcover, 448 pages, 27.2 x 20 cm
Published by
Brooklyn Museum / Brooklyn
Phaidon / London
$90.00 - Out of stock
The first publication dedicated to artists' zines in North America, a revelatory exploration of an unexamined but thriving aesthetic practice
Copy Machine Manifestos captures the rich history of artists' zines as never before, placing them in the lineage of the visual arts and exploring their vibrant growth over the past five decades. Fully illustrated with hundreds of zine covers and interiors, alongside work in other media, such as painting, photography, film, video, and performance, the book also features brief biographies for more than 100 zine-makers including Beverly Buchanan, Mark Gonzales, G.B. Jones, Miranda July, Bruce LaBruce, Terence Koh, LTTR, Ari Marcopoulos, Mark Morrisroe, Raymond Pettibon, Brontez Purnell, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Kandis Williams. Accompanying a major exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, this expansive book, bound as a paperback with a separate jacket, focuses on zines from North America, celebrating how artists have harnessed the medium's essential role in community building and transforming material and conceptual approaches to making art across all media since 1970.
2024, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 21.5 x 15.2 cm
Published by
Nightboat Books / New York
$46.00 - In stock -
Collected for the first time, four landmark works of queer experimental poetry by reclusive cult poet David Melnick, known for his prowess with invented language and sound poetry.
David Melnick's Nice: Collected Poems spans twenty crucial years of gay life and experimentation with poetic form, bringing together four masterworks of American literature: Eclogs (1967-70), ten episodes in the urban afterlife of pastoral; PCOET (1972), written in an unknown tongue, verse for a world that's yet to be; Men in Aida (1983-85), Melnick's masterpiece, a giddy epic of queer community; and A Pin's Fee (1988), a backward glance and elegy, a cry of pain, howl of anger.
"An autobiographical narrative of indefinite description but definite emotional scope sits behind the surface of the text, a surface...magically moved in and out of focus."—Tom Mandel
"It isn't just that this book queers the ways in which meaning is understood.... It also sites the reader in a homographical relation to language, one of having to parse what looks, or sounds, or seems 'like,' something we're familiar with, while also abandoning previous assumptions about what this process might entail."—Colin Herd
"Melnick's twist of "gay ethic" in poetic language makes for a brief but unforgettable oeuvre. Nice: Collected Poems proves that David Melnick is an exemplary figure of unreadability in American poetics, one who continues to teach us of unreadability's pleasures, politics, and pains. . . [T]he posthumous volume brings the once-hermetic Melnick out into the light of new audiences."—Gabriel Ojeda-Sague, Harriet
"A gem of consciousness through which facets dream of their kinfolk radiance."—Aaron Shurin
1996, Englis / French
Softcover, 176 pages, 21.5 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Anvil Press Poetry / London
$25.00 - Out of stock
Out-of-print 1976 Anvil Press Poetry collection of poetry by Guillaume Apollinaire (1880—1918), one of the foremost poets of the early 20th century, as well as one of the most impassioned defenders of Cubism and forefather of Surrealism. In bi-lingual French-English.
Apollinaire's poetry reflects the heady years of artistic and intellectual ferment before the First World War. The most dynamic modernist French poet, he is remembered as much for his more traditional lyric poems as for the typographical experiments of his 'calligrammes'. Apollinaire championed the Cubist painters, and his poetry is a literary counterpart to their innovative work. Subtle and complex, yet often direct, his poetry is still fresh, sharp and memorable.
Oliver Bernard's selection provides a representative cross-section of his poetry, while concentrating on his most famous collection, Alcools (1913). This is a revised and expanded edition of his 1965 Penguin selection, of which Edward Lucie-Smith wrote, "If the value of really inspired translation needs any stressing, Oliver Bernard's Apollinaire is there to prove the case. The French poet and his English interpreter are wonderfully well-matched." Christopher Ricks commented in the New Statesman that "Oliver Bernard's translations from Apollinaire are immediately engaging in their vividness and humour."
GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE was born in Rome in 1880. Educated in Monaco and Nice, he became a French citizen only in 1916, after service in the artillery and infantry. He was badly wounded in the head in 1916, and died during the Paris flu epidemic in 1918. As prose writer and art critic as well as poet, Apollinaire was the moving spirit of French modernism.
OLIVER BERNARD has published three collections of poetry, most recently Poems (Samizdat, 1983) and Five Peace Poems (Five Seasons Press, 1985). His edition of Rimbaud's poetry is published by Penguin. He has lived in Norfolk for the past twenty years.
Fine copy.
2023, English / German / French
Softcover, 128 pages, 13.97 x 22.23 cm
Published by
World Poetry Books / New York
$40.00 - Out of stock
The Loveliest Vowel Empties presents for the first time in English the collected poems of legendary Swiss Surrealist Meret Oppenheim, printed with facing-page originals in German and French.
Oppenheim's poetry—49 poems written between 1933 and 1980—moves beyond Surrealism to inhabit a voice all her own, with imagery and sound that, as the Herald Tribune wrote, "express witty and poetic responses to the surprises of life."
A key figure of the Paris art scene in the 1930s, Oppenheim moved in a circle that included André Breton, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and Elsa Schiaparelli. Writing for the Village Voice about her work, Gary Indiana noted that "the singularity of Meret Oppenheim's work is such that nothing seems dated ... the range of the work and its quirky self-assurance are striking." The publication of her collected poems coincides with a major retrospective exhibition of her artwork at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
"I am in awe of Meret Oppenheim's poems, a seismic force heretofore unknown to me. Her aesthetic compatriots include Alejandra Pizarnik, Georg Trakl, Max Jacob, and Paul Celan—artists of deep symbol, deep void. Kathleen Heil's translations are themselves works of the highest literary refinement and ingenuity. To read Oppenheim's lyric bulletins, conveyed tactfully into English, is to feel that we are plunging for the first time into the pure waters of poetry itself, impervious to fad. No dross, no affectation: instead, Oppenheim gives us strangeness, tone, translucency."—Wayne Koestenbaum
"What an ingenious way of translating this superbly ingenious poet/artist! Over and over, Kathleen Heil selects a word which many would find out of the way, although I find this a true delight. To me, it feels as deeply surrealist as possible. Two examples may suffice: for the verb 'nimmt, ' she offers us the rare 'thieves' instead of the far more usual 'steals' or 'robs'; while for 'Wie rät ein Untergang dem nächsten?' she selects the far less ordinary phrase: 'How does one demise advise the next?' thus capturing a near-echo. Such a gift proves true throughout this all-in-all inventive rendering. The extraordinary Meret Oppenheim deserves no less!"—Mary Ann Caws
"The singularity of Meret Oppenheim's work is such that nothing seems dated ... the range of the work and its quirky self-assurance are striking."—Gary Indiana, Village Voice
"Oppenheim's poetry often feels as if a fairy tale and a bestiary were put into a blender."—John Bradley, Rain Taxi Review
1997, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 20.96 x 14.61 cm
Published by
Farrar Straus & Giroux / New York
$38.00 - Out of stock
Mina Loy's technique and subjects - prostitution, menstruation, destitution, and suicide - shock even some modernists and she vanished from the poetry scene as dramatically as she had appeared on it. Roger Conover has rescued the key texts from the pages of forgotten publications, and has included all of the futurist and feminist satires, poems from Loy's Paris and New York periods, and the complete cycle of "Love Songs," as well as previously unknown texts and detailed notes.
Edited by Roger L Conover.
"[Mina Loy] may now be launched on a posthumous career as the electric-age Blake."—Hugh Kenner, The Washington Times
"Mina Loy has finally been admitted into 'the company of poets, ' the canon. As if she cared."—Thom Gunn, The Times Literary Supplement
Mina Loy was born in London in 1882, became American, and lived variously in New York, Europe, and finally, Aspen, Colorado until she died in 1966. Flamboyant and unapologetically avant-garde, she was a painter, poet, novelist, essayist, manifesto-writer, actress, and dress and lampshade designer. Her life involved an impossible abundance of artistic friends, performance and spectacular adventures in the worlds of Futurism, Christian Science, Feminism, Fashion, and everything modern and modernist.
2022, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 208 pages, 21.6 x 16.7 cm
Published by
Reaktion books / London
$40.00 - In stock -
Mina Loy was born in London in 1882, became American, and lived variously in New York, Europe, and finally, Aspen, Colorado until she died in 1966. Flamboyant and unapologetically avant-garde, she was a painter, poet, novelist, essayist, manifesto-writer, actress, and dress and lampshade designer. Her life involved an impossible abundance of artistic friends, performance and spectacular adventures in the worlds of Futurism, Christian Science, Feminism, Fashion, and everything modern and modernist.
This new account by Mary Ann Caws explores Mina Loy's exceptional life, and features many rare images of Loy and her husband, the swiss writer, poet, artist, boxer and provocateur Arthur Cravan, who disappeared without trace in 1918.
About the Author
Mary Ann Caws is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature, English, and French, Graduate School of the City University of New York. She is the author of many books including The Modern Art Cookbook and Creative Gatherings: Meeting Places of Modernism, both published by Reaktion Books.
Industry Reviews
‘Much like its subject, Mina Loy: Apology of Genius runs on restlessness, fervor, and open-endedness. With it, Mary Ann Caws has gifted us yet another stirring assemblage that teaches and excites, this time blessedly dilating on a singularly complex, singularly wild figure at the heart of the modern and so much else.’
Maggie Nelson author of The Argonauts
‘Startlingly original, personal, and wonderfully refreshing in its candour. Beautifully and copiously illustrated, this bio-critical overview gives us a genuinely new perspective on the exciting poetry, critical prose, and artworks of this great avant-garde artist.’—Marjorie Perloff author of Infrathin: An Experiment in Micropoetics
1979, English
Softcover, 174 pages, 20.5 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Dolceamore Publishing / Carlton
$50.00 - In stock -
Rare copy of Australian performance artist Lin Van Hek's first 1979 collection of writings and short stories, The Slain Lamb Stories, published independently by Dolceamore Publishing in Carlton. Ten stories accompanied by photographs by photographer Jacqueline Mitelman and film-maker Monique Schwarz.
"Her precise bold style does not compromise. Her collaboration between reality and fantasy possess the bracing clarity of the woman who both involved and informed, stands alone."—Reina Nervi Underground, Writers Guild Germany
Lin Van Hek (aka Lyn van Hecke, Linn Van Hek, born Lyn Whitehead) is an Australian writer, singer, painter, designer and performance artist. Born in Melbourne, Van Hek lived in India (working in hospitals) and Belgium, studied painting in France, writing and performing there until the early 1970s when she returned to Australia. She was a vice-president of the Society of Women Writers and co-founder of the literary-music group Difficult Women, that began with a series of feminist literary salons van Hek held in the 1980s. Van Hek has acted in films, including the 1987 thriller "With Time to Kill", and with Joe Dolce, wrote and sang the song 'Intimacy' in the 1984 film The Terminator. Van Hek was also the lead singer with the 1980s electro-dance band Skin the Wig. The Lilian character in Helen Garner's Monkey Grip is said to be based on Van Hek. Lin is also a respected fashion designer, with her own label, Lin Van Hek Design, working in collaboration with women entrepreneurs in the mountain villages of North Vietnam since 1994.
Very Good copy
1994, Japanese
Softcover, 316 pages, 22 x 14.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Seidosha / Tokyo
$15.00 - In stock -
Eureka No. 9, published in Japan in 1994, a leading journal of poetry and criticism, this issue dedicated to the world of Italian director Federico Fellini, including texts by/about Pier Paolo Pasolini, Giulietta Masina, Anita Ekberg, Martin Scorsese, Italo Calvino, Alberto Moravia, full Fellini filmography, an essay on Balthus' teachings, plus much more. Contributors include critic Nagaharu Yodogawa, artist Hideaki Kawashima, director Nobuhiko Obayashi (House!), author Hirohide Takeyama, and much more... All in Japanese! Eureka is a heavy text journal, with scattered illustrations and film stills throughout.
Very Good copy, light wear.
2023, English
Softcover, 570 pages, 11.4 x 17.8 cm
Published by
Urbanomic / Cornwall
$55.00 - In stock -
An infernal catalogue of manic visionaries, inspired by the poetry of the Middle East.
In a new work in which conceptual elaboration, storytelling, and poetics are fused in the infernal heat of the desert, the cycle of Omnicide is closed with a philosophy of doom, deception, and the game, plunging headlong into the inevitable, the fatal, and the infinite.
A series of controlled combustions fuelled by fragments drawn from the poetry and literature of the Middle-East, Omnicide II introduces us to a new cast of manic visionaries, from the Selemaniac to the Crystallomaniac, the Bibliomaniac to the Aeromaniac. In his relentless cataloguing of the myriad figures and portents of omnicidal doom, Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh resumes the offensive of those writers, artists, and thinkers for whom the fiercest creative incandescence is only kindled in the shadow of certain doom.
Amid war cries and lullabies, mages, wolves and pelicans, sabres and crystals, drones and soul-stealers, in settings ranging from the opium den to the Qatari luxury hotels, with his unique style and methodology, his dizzying breadth of references, and his implacable will to follow the most deranging lines of thought and evoke the most startling images, Mohaghegh draws the reader into territories disturbing and unfamiliar, atmospheres delicate and grotesque, moods morbid yet life-affirming, in a book that evokes fever and exudes dead calm.
The utterly absorbing music of this writing both lulls and disquiets-a contemporary Necronomicon, an inexhaustible treasury of recipes for disaster, catastrophe, ruination and destruction, all in the name of the most intense creation.
Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Babson College. His focus is on tracking experimental thought in the so-called Middle East and the West, with particular attention to exploring concepts of chaos, violence, illusion, silence, sectarianism, madness, disappearance, and apocalyptic writing. He is the author of The Chaotic Imagination (2010); Inflictions (2012); The Radical Unspoken (2013); Insurgent, Poet, Mystic, Sectarian (2015); Omnicide- Mania, Fatality, and the Future-In-Delirium (Urbanomic/Sequence Press, 2019); and Night- A Philosophy of the After-Dark (2020).
1971, Japanese
Softcover (staple-bound), 160 pages, 21.5 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Lemon Inc. / Tokyo
$90.00 - In stock -
Inaugural 1971 issue of legendary Japanese underground arts periodical, Black Magazine (or Black Notebook), a pioneering platform of the 1970s subculture in Tokyo. A magazine like no-other, each issue "a paradise of 1970's heretical culture", introduces a new wave of illustrators and photographers, radical criticism, avant-garde comics, sadistic literature, poetry, underground film and theatre, and all manner of transgressive, esoteric and erotic material, alongside well-known authors... This scarce first issue with incredible cover by Japanese illustrator Ken Katayama, features work/contributions by author Izumi Suzuki, film director Michio Okabe, artist Genpei Akasegawa, critic Junzo Ishiko, author Boris Vian, film director Eiichi Uchida, film critic Jin'ichi Uekusa, manga artist Shotaro Ishinomori, author Mieko Kanai, music critic Masaaki Hiraoka, artist Koichi Tanigawa, manga artist Shigeru Sugiura, graphic designer Mad Amano, doll artist Shimon Yotsuya, illustrator G. Akechi, art critic Junzo Ishiko, art critic Yoshida Yoshie, film director Toshio Matsumoto, graphic artist Keiichi Tanaami, author Koji Suzuki, artist Toshio Saeki, manga artist Shigeru Mizuki, manga artist Mori Masaki, manga artist Mitsuhiko Yoshida, artist Tsunehisa Kimura, playwright Jūrō Kara, and many more. A lot of great things started in the pages of this unique magazine. A highly recommended publication!
Good—Very Good copy, general wear/age.
2023, English
Softcover, 60 pages, 14.8 x 21 cm
Edition of 150,
Published by
no more poetry / Naarm
$25.00 - Out of stock
no more poetry presents nmp.17:
a portrait of me running as fast as the plant is growing
by Kiara Lindsay
Edition of 150
no more poetry alum, Brayden writes of nmp.17:
In a portrait of me running as fast as the plant is growing, the poet runs toward themselves, again and again; each poem a fierce affirmation of the self. This is a slippery kind of poetics; Lindsay does not readily accept an objective sense of reality, and in reading these poems there is the feeling of having one’s own reality pulled out from underneath you, in a way that is both startling and thrilling. These poems explore the release that comes with embracing multitudes. An offensively good collection, from one of Naarm’s most authentic writers.
Kiara Lindsay is an author.
She lives and writes in Naarm (Melbourne)
1968 / 1969, Japanese / French
4 Vols., softcover, approx. 1000 pages, 23 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Tensei Shuppan / Tokyo
$340.00 - Out of stock
Complete 4 issue run of Le Sang Et La Rose — a masterpiece of the Japanese underground! Opening with Kishin Shinoyama's photographic portraits of Yukio Mishima depicted as Saint Sebastian and onward through one thousand pages exploring the outer limits of subversive human potential!
Revue de Érotologie, Homosexualité, Sadisme, Masochisme, Fétischisme, Narcissime, Infantilisme, Magie, Occultisme, Humour Noir, Complexe Psychisme. What more could you ask for? Le Sang Et La Rose was a groundbreaking, yet short-lived Japanese arts and literary journal published in Tokyo from late 1968—mid 1969, published in a total of four luxurious, now collectible, volumes. The first three issues were edited by Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (1928—1987), a legendary, controversial Japanese novelist, art critic, translator of French writers such as Jean Cocteau, Georges Bataille and Marquis de Sade, and specialist in medieval demonology. The fourth final issue, and rarest of the four, edited by critic Masaaki Hiraoka and designed by self-taught painter, graphic designer and political activist, Kiyoshi Awazu (!) The importance of this magazine to the Japanese avant-garde and radical culture cannot be overstated.
Born from a period of political, social and economical turmoil in Japan, Le Sang Et La Rose may be understood as a emblematic distillation and product of the late ‘60s student rebellion and anti-authoritarian underground culture. Wilfully politically subversive, the publication drew upon a vast range of perspectives - from criticism, literature, obscure esoteric sciences, art, eroticism, radical avant-garde and a historical-rooted Japanese counterculture; featuring literature, theory, art, photography, illustration and graphic design from the most innovative and subversive Japanese and international (predominately French) artists, authors and critics, spanning the themes above. As instigator, Tatsuhiko Shibusawa in effect formulated the magazine’s design to be a spiritual and political operative that would weaponize its readers minds. This stance was made clear in the 1969 manifesto text — "My 1969" — in which Shibusawa discuss' how he perceived the ‘60s as being the age of ideas, ideas as weapons, and outlined a distain towards systems of power, moralism, State oppression, sanitised and harmless liberalism, dogmatic academic sciences and an outright distrust for ideological, progressive literary scholars who advocate "freedom of expression", but have never caused friction with the judicial power. The magazine sketched out an aim to push towards a new kind of personal freedom, intellect, autonomy and moral compass. Here, the concept of ‘erotism’ — as discussed by Georges Bataille in his highly influential 1957 book "Erotism: Death and Sensuality" — acts as a critical force.
Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (1928—1987), was a well-known and controversial Japanese novelist, art critic, and translator of French writers such as Jean Cocteau, Georges Bataille and Marquis de Sade. In 1960 he and his publisher, Kyōji Ishii, were trialled for public obscenity over the publishing of Shibusawa's translation of de Sade's Juliette into the Japanese language. What was to be known as the "Sade Trial" took 9 years and although many of Japan's leading authors testified for the defense, in 1969 the Japanese Supreme Court ruled them guilty and charged. This did not deter Shibusawa, whose essays on black magic, demonology and eroticism were popular reading in Japan, and in 1981 he was awarded the 9th Izumi Kyoka Literature Prize.
All Good—VG copies with general wear and age.
1998, English
Softcover, 464 pages, 15.5 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Purple Institute / Paris
$190.00 - Out of stock
PURPLE magazine ("Fashion, Prose, Special, Fiction, Interior") Number 2, Winter 1998-1999. A rare copy of this early edition of Purple, edited by Elein Fleiss and Olivier Zahm, this wonderful early issue features work by: Mark Borthwick, Alex Bag, Tobjorn Rodland, Antek Walzcak, Andrea Zittel, Martin Margiela, Bernadette Corporation, Laetitia Benat, Susan Cianciolo, Doug Aitken, Maurizio Cattelan, Karl Holmqvist, Arto Lindsay, Dora Garcia, Phillipe Parreno, Takashi Noguchi, Viktor & Rolf, Bernadette Van-Huy, Richard Prince, Banu Cennetoglu, Comme des Garcons, Rita Ackermann, Katja Rahlwes, Terry Richardson, Nathaniel Goldberg, Annette Messager, Helmut Lang, Colin De Land, Dan Graham, Marcelo Krasilcic, Takashi Homma, and many many more.
In 1992, Elein Fleiss and Olivier Zahm started the magazine Purple Prose as a reaction against the superficial glamour of the 1980s; much as a part of the global counterculture at the time, inspired by magazines like Interview, Ray Gun, Nova, and Helmut Newton's Illustrated, but with the aesthetics of what usually is referred to as anti-fashion. Based on their personal interests and views; Purple was, and in a sense still is, made much in the same spirit of the fanzine. Started "without any means, and without any experience, because we wanted to make a magazine that was radically different. We wanted to support the artists around us that no one else supported, much less talked about."—Olivier Zahm. The magazine became associated with the "realism" of the new fashion photography of the 1990s, with names like Juergen Teller, Terry Richardson, Wolfgang Tillmans, Mark Borthwick, Corinne Day, and Mario Sorrenti. Soon after the birth of Purple Prose, Zahm and Fleiss created spin-off publications such as les cahiers purple, Purple Sexe, Purple Fiction, and of course, Purple Fashion, in which Zahm aimed at fusing together his two worlds, fashion and art. Now one of the most iconic and influential fashion magazines in history.
Very Good—Neear Fine copy.
2000, English
Softcover, 500 pages, 21.5 x 15.7 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Purple Institute / Paris
$190.00 - In stock -
Purple 6 Winter '00 '01 : fashion, prose, special fiction, interior
A rare early issue of the iconic Purple magazine, edited by Elein Fleiss and Olivier Zahm, this wonderful early edition features work by: Richard Prince, Susan Cianciolo, Bless, Cris Moor, Lutz, Maison Martin Margiela, Hermés, Giasco Bertoli, Junya Watanabe, Comme des Garçons, Lars Botten, Bernhard Willhelm, Hussein Chalayan, Camille Vivier, Cosmic Wonder, Fendi, Terry Richardson, Anders Edstrom, Balenciaga, Vanina Sorrenti, Helmut Lang, Banu Cennetoglu, Veronique Branquinho, Chikashi Suzuki, Marc Jacobs, Ann-Sofie Back, Lodge Kerrigan, Mark Borthwick, Olivier Zahm, Jeff Rian, Bernard Joisten, Bruce Benderson, Andy Stillpass, Bennett Simspon, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Pete Taylor, Jason Simon, Pablo Leon De La Barra, Panu Aree, Tim Griffin, Dayton Taylor, Dike Blair, Gareth James, Michael Drake, Antek Walczak, Guillaume Nez, Tom Betterton, John Kelsey, Cheryl Donegan, Mark Fishman, Ole Scheeren, Sarah Gavlak, Alix Lambert, Tan Lin, Sharon Mesmer, Sharon Mesmer, Peter Josephs, Benjamin Weismann, Jordan Davis, Fred El Bekkay, Michael Danner, Giasco Bertoli, Andreas Larsson, James Gooding, Alex Antitch, Elein Fleiss, Henry Roy, Rami Maymon, Torbjorn Rodland, Marcello Simeoni, Delphine Roque, Michael Danner, Stefan Ruiz, and many many more. Art directed by Christophe Brunnquell.
In 1992 Olivier Zahm and his partner Elein Fleiss printed the first issue of Purple Prose, a Parisian literary art zine that over the years has evolved into Purple Fashion Magazine and Purple. Soon after the birth of Purple Prose, Zahm and Fleiss created spin-off publications like les cahiers purple, Purple Sexe, Purple Fiction, and of course, Purple Fashion. Zahm aimed at fusing together his two worlds, fashion and art, in creating Purple.
Very Good copy.
1967, English
Softcover, 100 pages, 23 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
North Atlantic Books / Vermont
$55.00 - In stock -
First edition of 20,000 A.D., a collection of poetry from the 1960s—70s by founder of Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, and the Fugs, Ed Sanders, published by North Atlantic Books, Vermont, in 1976. Deeply influenced by the work of Dylan Thomas, Ezra Pound, and Allen Ginsberg, Sanders helped bridge the concerns of Beat poetry and the countercultural movement of the 1960s. Sanders discussed his approach to investigative poetry: “Nonfiction is a kind of map of fragments of information sequenced together, like an elegant baklava with layers of meaning,” he alleged. “You have to think of different arrays of sequencing information … You have to make an apt choice, or an artistic choice, or an aesthetic choice about what you put in—and what you leave out. It’s an art form when to say no. Especially in investigative poetry, it’s a mission.”
Very Good copy, light tanning.
1978, English
Softcover, 54 pages, 17.5 x 12.5 cm
Ed. of 500,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
This Press / San Francisco
$80.00 - Out of stock
Rare copy of the only edition of Quartz Hearts by poet Clark Coolidge, published by This Press, San Francisco, California, in 1978; typeset by Barrett Watten and printed at The West Coast Print Center. "Quartz Hearts (a long grouping of aggregate works?) [...] meditations on the state(s) of things in other words words...".—C.C. Poetry book published in edition of 500 copies by jazz drummer Coolidge (b. 1939), associated with the Second Generation New York School and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets during the 1960's, and celebrated author of written works on the weather, bebop, surrealism...
Good copy with small chip to bottom left cover corner, previous owner (Australia-based composer composer, instrument builder, sound poet, film-maker, Warren Burt — b. 1949) dated "April '87".
1974, English
Softcover, 304 pages, 20 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
New Directions / New York
$65.00 - In stock -
First 1974 paperback edition of Hermetic Definition by H.D. published by New Directions.
"The poem is as easy to read as breathing: it could be danced, it could be sung, the clarity of image is so perfect… Tremendous suggestiveness and magnetic force radiate from the scenes… H. D.’s verse has the balance, the amplitude and the clean outlines of a Greek temple."—Nation
The fabulous beauty of Helen of Troy is legendary. But some say that Helen was never in Troy, that she had been conveyed by Zeus to Egypt, and that Greeks and Trojans alike fought for an illusion. A fifty-line fragment by the poet Stesichorus of Sicily (c. 640-555 B.C.), what survives of his Pallinode, tells us almost all we know of this other Helen, and from it H. D. wove her book-length poem. Yet Helen in Egypt is not a simple retelling of the Egyptian legend but a recreation of the many myths surrounding Helen, Paris, Achilles, Theseus, and other figures of Greek tradition, fused with the mysteries of Egyptian hermeticism.
An innovative modernist writer, Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961) wrote under her initials in a career that stretched from 1909 to 1961. Although she is most well known for her poetry—lyric and epic—H.D. also wrote novels, memoirs, short stories, essays, reviews, a children’s book, and translations. An American woman who lived her adult life abroad, H.D. was engaged in the formalist experimentation that preoccupied much of her generation. A range of thematic concerns resonates through her writing: the role of the poet, the civilian representation of war, material and mythologized ancient cultures, the role of national and colonial identity, lesbian and queer sexuality, and religion and spirituality.
Very Good copy.
1972, English
Softcover, 118 pages, 20.5 x 13 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
New Directions / New York
$45.00 - Out of stock
First 1972 paperback edition of Hermetic Definition by H.D. published by New Directions.
"With the War Trilogy and Helen of Egypt, these three poems of H. D.’s late phase bring into print the great works of a poet who is of the same order for me as Ezra Pound or William Carlos Williams: the work of an imagination that incorporates boldly the modern consciousness and aesthetic and the traditional, psychoanalytic realism and hermetic visionary experience."—Robert Duncan
H. D.’s (Hilda Doolittle, 1884—1961) late poems of search and longing represent the mature achievement of a poet who has come increasingly to be recognized as one of the most important of her generation. The title poem and other long pieces in this collection (“Sagesse” and “Winter Love”) were written between 1957 and her death four years later, and are heretofore unpublished, except in fragments. We can see now in proper context her fine ear for the free line, and understand why other poets, such as Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan, find so much to admire in H. D.’s work. As in her earlier books, one level of H.D.’s significant poetic statement derives from her intimate knowledge of and identification with classical Greek and arcane cultures; taken together, these elements make up the poet’s own personal myth. Norman Holmes Pearson, H. D’s friend and literary executor, has contributed an illuminating foreword to this impressive collection.
An innovative modernist writer, Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961) wrote under her initials in a career that stretched from 1909 to 1961. Although she is most well known for her poetry—lyric and epic—H.D. also wrote novels, memoirs, short stories, essays, reviews, a children’s book, and translations. An American woman who lived her adult life abroad, H.D. was engaged in the formalist experimentation that preoccupied much of her generation. A range of thematic concerns resonates through her writing: the role of the poet, the civilian representation of war, material and mythologized ancient cultures, the role of national and colonial identity, lesbian and queer sexuality, and religion and spirituality.
Very Good copy.
1957, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 20.5 x 13 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Grove Press / New York
Evergreen Review Inc. / New York
$35.00 - Out of stock
First 1957 paperback edition, seventh printing, of Selected Poems of H.D., published by Evergreen/Grove Press.
H.D.'s Selected Poems demonstrates anew the enduring quality of her lyricism. Though her early poems received spontaneous praise as proof that the "Imagists" wrote memorable poetry, since 1930 it has been a misnomer to define H. D.'s poems as Imagist verse. "How-ever," she has remarked, "I don't know that labels matter very much. One writes the kind of poetry one likes. Other people put labels on it. Imagism was something that was important for poets learning their craft early in this century. But after learning his craft, the poet will find his true direction."
Like other gifted poets of individual distinction, H. D. has taken her own road beyond the limitations of a group. As the present selection of her poems shows, she has created the kind of poetry which, as she says, "has grown down into the depths ... spreading upwards to heaven."
The Greek quality of her poems has been noted by her early critics, yet this quality has also been infused with her memories of the New England seacoast where she spent her girlhood holidays. Whatever her imagination has gathered from other sources is within the heritage of a twentieth-century American poet. Readers of her Selected Poems will be given the opportunity to rediscover a lyric poet of excellent temper and perception.
An innovative modernist writer, Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961) wrote under her initials in a career that stretched from 1909 to 1961. Although she is most well known for her poetry—lyric and epic—H.D. also wrote novels, memoirs, short stories, essays, reviews, a children’s book, and translations. An American woman who lived her adult life abroad, H.D. was engaged in the formalist experimentation that preoccupied much of her generation. A range of thematic concerns resonates through her writing: the role of the poet, the civilian representation of war, material and mythologized ancient cultures, the role of national and colonial identity, lesbian and queer sexuality, and religion and spirituality.
Very Good copy.
1973, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 172 pages, 21 x 14.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Carcanet Press / Cheshire
$90.00 - In stock -
Very rare first 1973 hardcover edition of H.D.'s classic war Trilogy (The Walls Do Not Fall (1944), Tribute to the Angels (1945) and The Flowering of the Rod (1946), collected for the first time and published together by Carcanet Press, Cheshire. American first editions followed the following year.
"…this ecstasy, ecstasy in language, in beautiful language, is what carries me through the entire trilogy, not only content with her trick…not only content with these high-handed fictions but enchanted with her whole poem, not to say enraptured."—Hayden Carruth, Hudson Review
HD's war Trilogy ranks with Eliot's Four Quartets, Pound's Pisan Cantos and poems like Edith Sitwell's 'Still Falls the Rain' as civilian war poetry in a war which tore apart so many of the cities of Europe. The outer violence of the scene touches the deepest nerves, bringing together a remarkable range of human experience and response.
The Walls Do Not Fall (1944), Tribute to the Angels (1945) and The Flowering of the Rod (1946) were first published in small editions which became collectors' items. They were brought together for the first time in 1973 and recognised as a major poem of our time in which HD decisively transcends the purism of her early styles. With deft indirection she uncovers, through modulation and subversion of a language burdened with history, the very heart of her concerns as a woman of this century carrying the songs and silences of earlier centuries in her bones.
An innovative modernist writer, Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961) wrote under her initials in a career that stretched from 1909 to 1961. Although she is most well known for her poetry—lyric and epic—H.D. also wrote novels, memoirs, short stories, essays, reviews, a children’s book, and translations. An American woman who lived her adult life abroad, H.D. was engaged in the formalist experimentation that preoccupied much of her generation. A range of thematic concerns resonates through her writing: the role of the poet, the civilian representation of war, material and mythologized ancient cultures, the role of national and colonial identity, lesbian and queer sexuality, and religion and spirituality.
Very Good copy in Good distjacket with some chipping/small tears (preserved in mylar wrap)
1971 / 1975, English
Softcover, 64 pages, 19.5 x 13 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Faber & Faber / London
$35.00 - In stock -
First 1971 paperback edition in 1975 print of Crossing the Water by Sylvia Plath.
In this volume Ted Hughes has collected a number of poems written by Sylvia Plath in the transitional period between the publication of The Colossus (1960) and before the composition of the poems in Ariel.
'Crossing the Water is full of perfectly realised works. Its most striking impression is of a front-rank artist in the process of discover-ing her true power. Such is Plath's control that the book possesses a singularity and certainty which should make it as celebrated as The Colossus or Ariel. It's capable of bearing the full weight of the grand style while staying true to the sharpest observation of reality.'—Peter Porter in the New Statesman
'Miss Plath's poems chronologically fall between The Colossus (1960) and the posthumous volume Ariel (1965), and to my mind they are her best. ... These poems are an almost perfect marriage of strength and elegance.'—Lyman Andrews in the Sunday Times
'Sustained poems of great quality are gathered in this book. . . . Crossing the Water is an indispensable book, and Sylvia Plath is one of that handful of modern poets whom intelligent readers will feel, more and more, that they have no option but to try and understand.'—Douglas Dunn in Encounter
Very Good copy.
2015, English
Softcover, 288 pages, 21.6 x 27.9 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$45.00 - In stock -
Hamlet, mise-en-scène
EXTRA TROUBLE—Jack Smith in Frankfurt
Texts by Sylvère Lotringer, Birte Löschenkohl, Sophie von Olfers, Laura Preston, Juliane Rebentisch, Mark von Schlegell, et al.
The publication brings together extensive material from Hamlet, mise-en-scène presented at Portikus, along with recently restored as well as never-published stills, drawings, and writings by American filmmaker and artist Jack Smith, related to his filmHamlet in the Rented World (A Fragment) (1970–73).
Hamlet, mise-en-scène, directed by Mark von Schlegell, was an adaptation that retold Shakespeare’s most abused tragedy while channeling the ghost of Jack Smith. The two-night rendition of Hamlet was performed by members of Städelschule’s Pure Fiction seminar, presented here alongside a rare selection of works by Smith, both from private collections and from the Jack Smith Archive.
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