"AND ALWAYS COMING BACK / TO THE MOORING OF STARTING OUT, THAT DAY SO LONG AGO": SIGNED BY JOHN ASHBERY

ASHBERY, John. The Double Dream of Spring. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1970. Octavo, original half navy cloth, original dust jacket. $1250.

First edition of Ashbery's fourth book of poetry, his "most pastoral volume," signed on the title page by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author.

"Ashbery at his best, with all his characteristic difficulty, but also with his humor and his lyric gift . . . . most of the poems in this book perform discoveries, satisfied with nothing merely accidental, nothing less refined than 'fables that time invents / To explain its passing'" (New York Times). In his study of the poet, John Ashbery and English Poetry, Ben Hickman describes Double Dream of Spring as Ashbery's "most pastoral volume, adding that "like [John] Clare's poetry, [it] works to close down boundaries between poet, poem, and reader." Writing in The Yale Review, Guilio J. Pertile explains "there is an expansiveness of both tone and theme that was lacking in the shorter earlier lyrics, a quality that in the imagery is expressed through the recurrent motif of sunset. Again and again the poems refer to evening, as the transition into night and a vista onto an open landscape beckon the speaker to travel outward into it and to begin a spiritual quest which will fulfill the epic promise always implicit in pastoral beginnings." This volume contains such noteworthy and widely anthologized poems as "Soonest Mended," "For John Clare," and the New York School classic "Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape," in which "'Popeye sits in thunder, unthought of'" and "the Sea Hag was relaxing on a green couch." "First Edition" on copyright page.

Pages clean, text block edges lightly foxed; book and dust jacket with minor toning and wear to extremities. A very good signed copy.