- First Edition
- Hardcover
- Used
Seller: Plot Twist, Baltimore, MD, U.S.A.Plot Twist
AbeBooks seller since January 19, 2026
Condition: Used - Fine
£ 388.05
Quantity: 1 available
Add to basketItem description from seller
**SIGNED & DATED** First impression of the true first edition. Fine condition, fine dust jacket, best copy that I could find. In a brown cloth-covered boards with gilt titles to spine. Pages clean. No foxing. No inscriptions. Spine tight. In a fine bronze, black and white titled dustwrapper that has not been price-clipped, showing the original publisher's price of 25s net to bottom of front jacket flap. Extremities of dustwrapper very slightest bit creased on the front and back exterior boards. Dust wrapper clean and bright. 204mm x 134mm. 80 pages plus a note about the poet to the rear. W. S. Merwin won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2009 and is now recognized as an important poet. -Merwin's new style has indeed come to flower in The Lice. Throughout this book one discovers again and again a startling image, freshness in the handling of rhythm, the recognition of the potentialities of a word. Though he incorporates a variety of techniques there remains nonetheless a compelling unity within the collection. The poems mirror the poet's concerns: mutability, time and death.'' (Quote from inside front of dustwrapper blurb). ***First impression of the first UK edition, complete in its original dustwrapper, bright, clean rare collectable condition.…
Seller Inventory # 017
- Title
- The Lice
- Author
- W.S. Merwin
- Publisher
- Hart-Davis
- Publication year
- 1969
- Condition
- Fine
- Dust jacket
- Near Fine
- Binding
- Hardcover
- Language
- English
- ISBN 10
- 0246974397
- ISBN 13
- 9780246974396
- Edition
- 1st Edition
This Fiftieth Anniversary edition celebrates one of the most ground-breaking books in American poetry. When first published in 1967, W.S. Merwin's The Lice was ground-breaking. Its visionary urgency directly engaged the nexus of aesthetics and morality, exerting an immediate and lasting effect on the writing and reading of poetry. Like all great art, this monumental work continues to inspire.
As Merwin discussed in an interview, "The Lice was written at a time when I really felt there was no point in writing. I got to the point where I thought the future was so bleak that there was no point in writing anything at all. And so the poems kind of pushed their way upon me. I would be out growing vegetables and walking around the countryside when all of a sudden I'd find myself writing a poem, and I'd write it."
When the War is Over
When the war is over
We will be proud of course the air will be
Good for breathing at last
The water will have been improved the salmon
And the silence of heaven will migrate more perfectly
The dead will think the living are worth it we will know
Who we are
And we will all enlist again
W.S. Merwin is one of America's greatest poets. His recent books of poems have been honored with a Pulitzer prize, a National Book Award, and the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress. He lives in Hawaii.
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About the Author
"About the title" may belong to another edition of this title.
Plot Twist
Baltimore, MD, U.S.A.
AbeBooks seller since January 19, 2026
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