Autumn Rhythm: New and Selected Poems

Fayetteville, Arkansas: The University of Arkansas Press, 1996. P5 - A first edition (numberline starts at "1") hardcover book SIGNED and dated by Leon Stokesbury on the title page in very good condition in very good dust jacket that is mylar protected. Dust jacket has wrinkling, chipping and crease on the edges and corners, scattered rubbing, and some scratches and scuffing, light fold/vertical crease on the front flap, light discoloration and shelf wear. Book has some bumped corners, wrinkling on the spine edges, previous owner's info written on the front free endpaper, light discoloration and shelf wear. 9.25"x6.25", 127 pages. Satisfaction Guaranteed. In this selection of peoms written over thirty years, Leon Stokesbury careens through the Maple Leaf Bar and the Restaurant-on-the-Corner, Oklahoma City and Fairbanks, Alaska, consuming and offering up his sweet-and-sour vision of our lot in life. Whether he comes at us in masks as varied as his father and mother, Nick Bottom or John Keats, Senor Wences or Owen Glendower, it is his own Cheshire grin we spy creeping out around the edges. He readily sees the horror in the death of a New Orleans poet, in his own brother's sufferings, in the inescapable process of mutability itself, but he finds also, often enough, the dark joke at the center of things and the chance for redemptive laughter. With each turn of Stokesbury's kaleidoscopic vision, the reader is presented another pattern, cut from the same true glass but completely new and fully realized. The mystery of what it all adds up to gives these poems their strange sparkle. Whether in his own deeply personal voice or in the multitude of idioms from which he is able to draw - southern, midwestern, Shakespearean - Stokesbury creates whole landscapes in perfected, formal lines from the shards of memories and dreams.. Signed by Author. First Edition. Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall.