Throw Out the Life Line, Lay Out the Corse: Poems, 1965-1985

Asa Benveniste’s most extensive collection of poems draws from his earlier books and from his previously unpublished work, with a nod (as the subtitle implies) in the direction of poems yet to be written. Lyrical, surrealistic, serious and funny, his poems encompass the mysteries of Kabbalah and of domestic life, the latter – he writes – lending itself easily to a complex comedy of language.

Asa Benveniste was born in New York in 1925. Since settling in England in the 1950s, he worked as printer, typographer, book designer and as publisher of Trigram Press, one of the most influential small presses of recent years. He lectured on typography, design, poetry ‘and other idiocies of structure’. He lived in London, Norfolk and latterly in Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire. He died in 1990.