This lot is closed for bidding. Bidding ended on 9/19/2024
Spicer, Jack. Group of Four First Editions, including: After Lorca (original wrappers, one of 500 copies), The Holy Grail (original wrappers), Language (original wrappers), The Collected Books of Jack Spicer (one of 1,000 copies, hardback in acetate dust jacket). Some toning, soiling to paperback copies. Very good or better. “Jack Spicer’s poems are always poised just on the face side of language, dipping all the way over toward that sudden flip, as if an effort were being made through feeling strongly in simple words to sneak up on the event of a man ruminating about something, or celebrating something, without rhetorical formulae, in his own beautiful inept awkwardness. It’s that poised ineptitude and awkwardness of the anti-academic teacher, the scholar of linguistics who can’t say what he knows in formal language, and has chosen to be very naive and look and hear and do. Spicer was not a very happy poet. He was obsessed with possibilities he could only occasionally realize, and too aware of contemporary life to settle for anything less in his work than what he probably could not achieve. He must have been a great spirit.” (Richard Ellman, New York Times, 1975).