Achilles’ Song
New York: The Phoenix Book Shop, 1969. Oblong volume, measuring 5 x 7 inches: [16]. Side-stitched olive green wrappers in integral pictorial dust jacket printed in green and black. Original color frontispiece drawing by Duncan executed in pen and crayon. Hand-lettered “B” and signed by Duncan at colophon.
First edition of San Francisco poet Robert Duncan’s Achilles’ Song, in which the Greek hero imagines his mother, the sea nymph Thetis, calling him away from Troy: “Thetis, then, / my mother, has promised me / the mirage of a boat, a vehicle / of water within the water, / and my soul would return from / the trials of its human state, / from the long siege.” This is one of 26 copies lettered A to Z, each with an original illustration by the author, out of a total of 126 signed copies. Achilles’ Song was issued as Number 7 in the Phoenix Bookshop Oblong Octavo Series, a twenty-volume series that included poems by Marianne Moore, W.H. Auden, Amiri Baraka, Gregory Corso, and Louis Zukofsky. A fine copy, with an original drawing by Robert Duncan.
Price: $350.00