Shade

Seattle, WA: Mill Mountain Press, 1975. First edition. Near Fine. Powder gray wrappers, with titles stamped in dark brown on spine and front cover. Collating complete: [9], 44, [1]pp; illus. Hint of sunning to spine, with faint strip of subtle fading along upper edge of front wrapper. Very Near Fine.

Stanford's haunting and incisive collection came toward the middle of his brief career, and it carries the hallmarks of a maturing poetic voice. No longer a novice writer, Stanford had come into his own by this point; his sense of rhythm and imagery brings the reader into intense contact with ideas of death, solitude, and angst. Poems like Tryst, Humming This Song Trying to Remember the Way Another One Goes, and Slow Rag of the Yearbook reveal a preoccupation with those difficult moments that can never be fully put into words. One of seven titles he would release through the Mill Mountain Press prior to his suicide in 1978 at the age of 29, with four illustrations by artist Ginny Crouch Stanford throughout the text. Copyright page states "Limited Edition, Second Edition," though this is in fact the First - almost certainly a bit of bibliographic mischief perpetrated by the author. Near Fine.