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The Ring: Poems 1956-1969 Harry Mathews. Artwork by Joe Brainard

The Ring: Poems 1956-1969. Leeds, UK: Juillard Editions, 1970. Mathews’ first collection of poetry—from the press of his old friend, the artist Trevor Winkfield, and a gathering he dedicated to Maxine Groffsky. The first and only title in a projected series of Juillard Editions. Quarto [280 x 215] [38] pages duplicated typescript, rectos only, stapled into heavy card wrappers with artwork by Joe Brainard. $200.00 available from here: http://www.nicholaspounder.com/

Harry Mathews [1930 - ] If Harry Mathews is esteemed predominantly for his masterful fiction, it is nonetheless as a poet that he ventured upon a writing career. The marriage of form and content evident in the inventions of Tlooth or Cigarettes emerged from the discovery, as he puts it in a 1987 interview with John Ashbery, that prose could be written with the same arbitrariness as poetry. This discovery is traceable back to his initial encounter with the work of Raymond Roussel. Tempting as the separation of genres may be, it constitutes in regard to this writer’s works an absolute error. John Beer