Meditations In An Emergency.

O'HARA, Frank.

$8,500.00

Item Number: 115298

New York: Grove Press, 1957.

Number 25 of the rare first edition O’Hara’s classic work of poetry, published in an edition of 75 hardbound copies. Octavo, original cloth. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, “For Mike- Happy Birthday and I hope the Houses and Odes go on and on into 1262- Frank.” Near fine in the rare original slipcase. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box. Exceptionally rare, especially signed.

Frank O’Hara was one of the great poets of the twentieth century and, along with such widely acclaimed writers as Denise Levertov, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, and Gary Snyder, a crucial contributor to what Donald Allen termed the New American Poetry, “which, by its vitality alone, became the dominant force in the American poetic tradition.” Frank O’Hara was born in Baltimore in 1926 and grew up in New England; from 1951 he lived and worked in New York, both for Art News and for the Museum of Modern Art, where he was an associate curator. O’Hara’s untimely death in 1966 at the age of forty was, in the words of fellow poet John Ashbery, “the biggest secret loss to American poetry since John Wheelwright was killed.” “Moving in the way that only simple communication can be moving. . . . His poems always manage a fresh start, free from the dreadful posturings of the conventional verse of his generation" (Kenneth Rexroth, The New York Times Book Review).