LOWRY, Malcolm; Earle BIRNEY, and Margerie LOWRY (editors). Selected Poems. San Francisco: City Lights. 1967.
Small 4to. White front cover template surrounding black block square with white title lettering inside; specification of "Number Seventeen" in the seires; black back cover template surrounding white block square with black title lettrering blurb inside; features two rare photos of Lowry in black and white between pp.10-11 and on p.6; pp. [6], 7-79; minimal shelfwear discolouration/fading; otherwise very good.
First edition. The first comprehensive collection of Malcolm Lowry's poetry featuring two extremely rare photographs of the author during the final period of his life.
Edited by Lowry's close friend, Earle Birney, Canadian poet and novelist, alongside Lowry's widow, Marjerie, this Pocket Poets edition unites poems previously published as well as those never seen before.
"Success is like some horrible disaster/…Fame like a drunkard consumes the house of the soul" admits Lowry in his poem, 'After Publication of Under the Volcano'.
Malcolm Lowry is most famous for his novel Under the Volcano, which follows the final hours of an English alcoholic living in Mexico on the Day of The Dead and tracks all that transpires in a tangential story reminiscent of Joyce's Ulysses, for whom he was eventually claimed a successor. Although a grand accomplishment for an aspiring writer in their twenties, the book would not be published for almost a decade. It was in 1939 that Lowry met his wife, Marjerie, who came to his aid and fierecly edited his work, prompting him in new creative directions to an eventual finish line that brought him wide acclaim. Their intensely tempestuous relatonship makes Marjerie's influence on this partiuclar compilation more intruging.
Published five years after Lowry's tragic death- in the preface to this moving edition, Earle Birney writes, "The world he could not live with is drowning in its own element. The self-drownded poet survives here in his".
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