Poetry Night was something special at The Hound. We filled the shop with rare and vintage editions — Kunitz, Lowell, Ginsberg, LeRoi Jones, Ondaatje, Marge Piercy, Ferlinghetti, Muriel Spark, and more — and spent the evening with people who actually care about these poets.
A few highlights from the table:
The Testing-Tree by Stanley Kunitz, Atlantic–Little, Brown, first paperback edition — one of the most quietly devastating poetry collections of the American 20th century. Kunitz writing about memory, loss, and survival with that particular ferocity he never lost, even at 95. (Coming soon on the website.)
Robert Lowell’s Life Studies — the book that broke open confessional poetry and changed American verse permanently. LeRoi Jones’ The Dead Lecturer — published in 1964, the year before he became Amiri Baraka, raw and electric. Galway Kinnell’s The Book of Nightmares — a single long poem in ten sections, one of the great sustained acts of American imagination. Michael Ondaatje’s Handwriting — yes, that Ondaatje, long before most people knew him as a poet first. (Coming soon on the website.)
Already listed on the website are Marge Piercy's Stone, Paper, Knife, Stephen Crane's The Complete Poems, Muriel Spark's Collected Poems: 1, Paul Valēry's The Art of Poetry, Erica Jong's Half-Lives, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and Other Poems, The Complete Poems of Cavafy and Anais Nin's House of Incest.
