Tapping the White Cane of Solitude

Tapping the White Cane of Solitude by Franz Wright Coarse cream-coloured string-bound card, blind-stamped on front cover. Measures around 6 1/2" x 9 1/2" x 1/8" (166mm x 241mm x 4mm). Printed by the Triskelion Press, Oberlin, Ohio, 1976. Unpaginated but consists of two purple endpaper leaves and 14 cream-coloured leaves, all of coarse paper. First edition of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet's first book, one of a limited numbered and signed edition of 250 copies, this one being numbered 186 in the author's own hand and signed on the colophon at the rear. This copy is particularly fascinating and appears to be unique from other copies for sale in that the author himself has scored out nearly half the stanzas of the final poem 'The Return' in black marker and handwritten in an alternative ending to the poem. The seller does not know of any other copies containing this feature. Heavy toning around edges of binding. Some marking, scuffing and edge-wear, with bumped corners and some small indentations to bottom outer corners of covers and pages. Binding robust. Contains previous owner signature to recto of front free endpaper. Page surfaces generally clean. See pictures for further information. About the author:Franz Wright was born in Vienna, Austria and grew up in the Northwest, the Midwest, and California. He earned a BA from Oberlin College in 1977. His collections of poetry include The Beforelife (2001); God's Silence (2006); Walking to Martha's Vineyard, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004; Wheeling Motel (2009); Kindertotenwald (2011); and F (2013). In his precisely crafted, lyrical poems, Wright addresses the subjects of isolation, illness, spirituality, and gratitude. Of his work, he has commented, "I think ideally, I would like, in a poem, to operate by way of suggestion."Critic Helen Vendler wrote in the New York Review of Books, "Wright's scale of experience, like Berryman's, runs from the homicidal to the ecstatic . His best forms of or originality: deftness in patterning, startling metaphors, starkness of speech, compression of both pain and joy, and a stoic self-possession with the agonies and penalties of existence." Langdon Hammer, in the New York Times Book Review, wrote of God's Silence: "In his best poems, Wright grasps at the 'radiantly obvious thing' in short-lined short lyrics that turn and twist down the page. The urgency and calculated unsteadiness of the utterances, with their abrupt shifts of direction, jump-cuts and quips, mime the wounded openness of a speaker struggling to find faith."Wright received a Whiting Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He translated poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke and Rene Char; in 2008 he and his wife, Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright, co-translated a collection by the Belarusian poet Valzhyna Mort, Factory of Tears. He taught at Emerson College and other universities, worked in mental health clinics, and volunteered at a center for grieving children. His father was the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet James Wright. He died in 2015. [Source: Poetry Foundation] 14 leaves pp.…