Kerouac, Jack

Pomes All Sizes

San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 1992. First Edition, Second State. Softcover. “The original manuscript of this book, written between 1954 and 1965, has been in the safekeeping of City Lights all the years since Kerouac’s death in 1969. Reaching beyond the scope of his ‘Mexico City Blues,’ here are poems about Mexico and Tangier, Berkeley and the Bowery. Mid-fifties road poems, hymns and songs of God, drug poems, wine poems, Dharma poems and Buddhist meditations. Poems to Beat friends, goofball poems, quirky haiku, and a fine, long elegy in “Canuckian Child Patoi Probably Medieval…an English blues.” But more than a quarter of a century after it was written, ‘Pomes All Sizes’ today would seem to be more than the sum of its parts, revealing a questing Kerouac grown beyond the popular image of himself as a Beat on the Road” (from Back Cover). As the delectably informative back cover blurb and Allen Ginsberg’s (1926-1997) introduction do solemnly declare, this work was, in fact, effectively lost or forgotten for 23 years — the span in between Kerouac’s death (in 1969) and the publication of this here work in 1992. An overlooked classic of the Kerouac oeuvre, it is a book of “missing links” — links in-between “Mexico City Blues” (1959) & “Scripture of the Golden Eternity” (1960), for example, among other middle masterworks of said oeuvre. It is simply a “must-own” work for any serious Kerouac reader-collector. Cover art by the legendary poet and publisher of City Lights Books, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. [ISBN: 0-87286-269-0]. Trade-softcover First Edition, Second State; preceded only by the virtually unobtainable “First Edition, First State,” in which the printers (or designers) failed to put “Kerouac” on the spine. In strong fine condition with only minute-to-minor shelf-wear to fine-edges & corners of front, back covers & spine-edge; minute rubbing to same. Fine. [Item #5393]

Price: $20.00