KELLY, Robert.
A Strange Market.
SIGNED LIMITED ISSUE — ONE OF 125 NUMBERED HARDCOVER COPIES, THIS NO. 32. Santa Rosa, California: Black Sparrow Press, 1992.
First edition, signed limited issue: one of 125 numbered hardcover copies signed by the author, this copy number 32 (the limitation number in red). Text set in Garamond by Words Worth, designed by Barbara Martin, printed April 1992 in Santa Barbara and Ann Arbor by Mackintosh Typography and Edwards Brothers for Black Sparrow Press. Large octavo. 217 pp. Original cream cloth lettered in red and black to the spine, in the publisher's pictorial dust jacket — Barbara Martin's cream design with mauve topographic lines and red, gray, and blue accent squares — in the publisher's clear acetate sleeve. Signed in black ink "Robert Kelly" at the colophon. Near fine in a near fine dust jacket; bright, square, and clean throughout, the cloth fresh, the jacket's design elements crisp and unfaded, the acetate sleeve present and clean.
A collection of poems composed between 1986 and 1990. The poems range widely in Kelly's characteristic manner, moving from myth and the visual arts to formal experiment: the volume includes "A Flower for the New Year," chosen for The Best American Poetry 1991 (edited by Mark Strand), and "Unquell the Dawn Now," his homeophonic translation of Hölderlin's ode on the source of the Danube, Am Quell der Donau, in which the German is carried across into English by sound rather than sense. The book is dedicated to the printer Mary Moore Goodlett (1950–1990): "this book is for Mary Moore Goodlett 1950–1990 who shows me so much of the way."
Per the colophon, the book was issued in four states: paper wrappers; 200 cloth trade copies; 125 numbered hardcover copies signed by the author, of which this is one; and 26 lettered copies hand-bound in boards by Earle Gray, each with an original holograph poem by the poet.
SKU TO-2026-003
