Life Studies

One of the essential books of postwar American poetry, in a copy that retains its original dust jacket with the Elizabeth Bishop statement on the front flap. Bishop's words are among the most precise ever written about Lowell: she compares reading his poems to looking at her grandfather's Bible under a magnifying glass, the letters suddenly enlarged, alive, and rainbow-edged, illuminating as it magnified, able also to be used as a burning-glass.

Life Studies (1959) broke open American poetry. The confessional mode Lowell invented here — poems about his family, his hospitalizations, his marriage, his Boston childhood — changed what lyric poetry was permitted to say and how it was permitted to say it. "Skunk Hour," "My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow," "Memories of West Street and Lepke" — these are poems that rewrote the rules while following them. The prose memoir "91 Revere Street" appears here as well, the autobiographical fragment that the cover advertises.

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This is the fifth printing, 1966. Dedicated "For Elizabeth." Boards in green cloth, clean. Dust jacket present with wear — small tape repair at top of front flap, some edge wear — but holding and with the Bishop statement fully legible.