Thomas, Dylan | First edition, presentation copy

Thomas, Dylan

In Country Sleep. New York: New Directions, 1952

8vo. Photographic portrait mounted on title page. In original tan cloth, top edge red, with printed dustjacket; some sunning and off-setting to jacket. In slipcase with printed label.

First edition, presentation copy given to the poet, writer, and artist José García Villa. Signed twice; inscribed "For José Garcia Villa, yours, Dylan Thomas May 1952" on flyleaf, and singed on the following page, number 11 of 100 numbered copies signed by the author.

Dylan's volume contains six poems, including the first book appearances of "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night" and "Lament" and the first appearance in a Thomas book of "Over Sir John's Hill."

José García Villa was born in Manila in 1908, before moving to New Mexico to pursue his studies, and ultimately to Greenwich Village in New York City. There, he joined a community of modernist poets, including e.e. cummings, Marianne Moore, W.H. Auden, among others, and was affectionately known as "The Pope of Greenwich Village." He wrote his poems under the pseudonym Doveglion (a composite of dove, eagle, and lion) and was admired, according to Marianne Moore, for "the reverence, the raptness, the depth of concentration in [his] bravely deep poems." His 1933 story collection, Footnote to Youth: Tales of the Philippines and Others, was "the first work of fiction by a Filipino writer published by a major United States-based press."

Villa received “numerous honors and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Philippines Heritage Award, a Poetry Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, and a Shelley Memorial Award. In 1973 he was named a National Artist of the Philippines, and he also served as a cultural advisor to the Philippine government. He died in New York City on February 7, 1997.”

REFERENCE

Rolph B14; Academy of American Poets; Villa, Doveglion: Collected Poems, ed. John Edwin Cowen

PROVENANCE

José García Villa (inscription)