DOUGLAS, Keith. Alamein to Zem Zem.

Keith Douglas on the Battle of El Alamein

DOUGLAS, Keith. Alamein to Zem Zem. London: Editions Poetry. 1946.

[offered with:]

DOUGLAS, Keith; John WALLER and G.S. FRASER (editors). Collected Poems. London: Editions Poetry. 1951.

Alamein to Zem Zem: 8vo. Quarter red cloth over grey paper-covered boards, lettered in gilt to the spine, in the unclipped dust-jacket, the original 10/6 price covered with the publisher’s 8/6 net label; pp. [1], 141, [1], xvi; colour frontispiece and 2 colour plates; pages uniformly toned owing to the poor quality war standard paper stock, front endpaper and pastedown a little stained to lower inner margins, boards show some offsetting from the lettering to the lightly toned jacket, which is a little spotted, rubbed, and nicked to spine tips, with a small mark to rear; a very good copy of the scarce first edition in the famously fragile wrapper.

Collected Poems: 8vo. Original red cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in dust-jacket; pp. [22], 151, [1], frontispiece photographic portrait of the author and 5 further plates, tail-edge untrimmed; light offsetting to front and rear endpapers, small mark to fore-edge, mild wear to jacket extremities; else a bright, near fine copy.

Uncommonly bright first impressions of the first collected edition of Douglas’ poems and the poet’s great account, in prose, poetry, drawings and paintings, of his experiences at the battle of El Alamein in Egypt in 1942.

On 9 June 1944, Keith Douglas was killed in Normandy, aged twenty-four. He had, by this time, already completed a body of work that would earn him a reputation as the most accomplished English poet of the Second World War. ‘He is the only poet’, wrote Olivia Manning in October 1944, ‘who has written poems comparable with the works of the better poets of the last war and likely to be read as war poems when the war is over’.

In the introduction to his 1965 selection of Douglas’s poems for Faber and Faber, Ted Hughes wrote that ‘he has invented a style that seems able to deal poetically with whatever it comes up against. It is not an exalted verbal activity to be attained for short periods, through abstinence, or a submerged dream treasure to be fished up when the everyday brain is half-drugged. It is a language for the whole mind, at its most wakeful, and in all situations.’

Just before the battle of El Alamein in 1942, Douglas, stationed twenty miles behind the front line, rejoined (against orders) his old regiment in the desert. ‘Alamein to Zem Zem is the record, with a few names changed, of his battle experience as a junior tank officer up to the fall of Tunis’ (jacket). Desmond Graham, in his biography of the poet, records that Douglas, ‘awaiting his return to the regiment in Cairo at the beginning of May [1942] had bought a desk diary from Boileau and Caloghiris’ bookshop’. It was in this diary that he wrote Alamein to Zem Zem, though not in diary form: ‘keeping a diary’, he told his mother, ‘is something I could never do’.

The volume also includes poems written in the Middle East, together with a number of Douglas’s drawings and paintings, including three colour plates. The Spectator praised it as ‘throughout the work of a poet, and the only book of the late war comparable in descriptive power and intelligence to the books of Remarque, Sassoon and Blunden’. The book was reissued by Faber in 1966, with an introduction by Lawrence Durrell.

The Collected Poems, issued by Poetry London in 1951, was the first opportunity for readers to experience the full extent of Douglas’s achievement as a poet. Both volumes offered here are rarely encountered in such bright, clean condition.

SKU: 2124308