Description: Hardcover. 8vo. Faber & Faber Limited, London, UK. 1955. 76 pgs. First Edition/First Printing. DJ has light shelf-wear present to the DJ extremities (chip present to the crown of the DJ). No ownership marks present. Text is clean and free of marks, binding tight and solid, boards lightly rubbed and worn. “Does it disturb the language?” the Scottish poet W. S. Graham liked to ask about a poem. Graham’s do—strangely, comically, beautifully. His career fell into two parts. The early work is rapt and wild and incantatory, and culminates in the tour de force of 1955, The Nightfishing. Fifteen years of silence were then followed by an extraordinary late flowering: Graham’s poems became stark, quizzical, and unsettling, a continual teasing examination of thought and feeling that is also an ongoing investigation into the nature and power of poetry, work that is at once metaphysical and intimate, wry and elegiac. In these late poems, Graham emerges as one of the true originals of poetry in English. William Sydney Graham (1918–1986) was born into a working-class family in Greenock, Scotland, where his father worked as a shipbuilder. Graham studied structural engineering in Glasgow and philosophy and literature at Newbattle Abbey College outside of Edinburgh before publishing his first collection of poetry, Cage Without Grievance, in 1942. In 1947, he received the Rockefeller Foundation’s Atlantic Award for Literature and lectured at New York University for a year. Upon returning to the UK, he lived briefly in London, where he met T. S. Eliot, who accepted Graham’s fourth collection, The White Threshold, for publication by Faber and Faber in 1949. Shortly after, Graham moved to Cornwall where, with Agnes “Nessie” Dunsmuir, whom he married in 1954, he lived in a small village and often in great poverty for the rest of his life. A fifth book of poems, The Nightfishing, appeared in 1955; a sixth, Malcolm Mooney’s Land, in 1970. Aimed at Nobody was published posthumously by Faber and Faber in 1993. In 2018, the centenary of Graham’s birth was marked by the unveiling of a memorial stone outside the Writers’ Museum in Edinburgh. First Edition 1955 The Nightfishing W S Graham Hardcover w/Dustjacket Track Page Views WithAuctiva's FREE Counter
Price: 200 USD
Location: Charlottesville, Virginia
End Time: 2024-12-10T01:23:38.000Z
Shipping Cost: 0 USD
Product Images
Item Specifics
Return shipping will be paid by: Seller
All returns accepted: Returns Accepted
Item must be returned within: 30 Days
Refund will be given as: Money Back
Return policy details:
Author: W S Graham
Binding: Hardcover
Character Family: The Nightfishing
Country/Region of Manufacture: United Kingdom
Language: English
Original/Facsimile: Original
Place of Publication: London, UK
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Region: Europe
Special Attributes: 1st Edition, Dust Jacket, The Nightfishing, Poetry, Scottish poetry
Subject: Literature & Fiction
Topic: Poetry
Year Printed: 1955