A Catch of Anti-Letters

Andrews McMeel Publishing, 1978. Private Press edition and 1st. 1978 signed and inscribed first edition Sheed, Andrews and McMeel, Inc. (Kansas City, Missouri), 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches tall tancloth hardbound in publisher's unclipped dust jacket, viii, 128 pp.on fine wove paper. nicely preserved in a clear archival sleeve. Dust jacket with original calligraphy by Thomas Merton, frontispiece by Thomas Merton. Lax (1915-2000) was an American poet, known in particular for his association with the co-author of this collection, famed twentieth century Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton (1915-1968). Lax's most famous book, Circus of the Sun (1959), a meditation on creation, was heralded by The New York Times as 'perhaps the greatest English language poem of this century.' Because of the simplicity of his later work, he has been called one of the patron saints of literary minimalism; some of his poems can go on for several pages using no more than four words and a punctuation mark. Robert Lax has signed over the printed signature on the front endsheet quite clearly, this was a possibly personal copy lost or given away after his death, as he lived as something of a hermit on the Greek island of Patmos for most of the last 35 years of his life.…