Journey from Essex. Poems for John Clare

Port Townsend, Washington: Graywolf Press, 1981. First edition, one of “approximately 300 copies,” of this tribute to “peasant poet” John Clare (1793-1864). A Northamptonshire farm laborer whose personal struggles were compounded by mental illness, Clare produced hundreds of closely observed lyrics that remain startling in their immediacy and detail: “And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept, / Untroubling and untroubled where I lie / The grass below, above, the vaulted sky.” Two nineteenth-century poems by Clare, “I Am” and “I Feel I Am,” open and close this collection by modern American poets Mark Halperin, Sandra McPherson, Marvin Bell, Theodore Roethke, John Ashbery, Jon Anderson, and William Logan. A near-fine copy. Side-stitched octavo, measuring 9.5 x 6.5 inches: [16]. Original wrappers in integral olive dust jacket printed in black. Text printed on Nideggen paper in Bembo type. Light offsetting from pressed leaf to first page of text, lightest sunning to edges of wrappers.