Thomas, Dylan | First edition, presentation copy

Thomas, Dylan

Deaths and Entrances. London: J.M. Dent & Sons LTD., 1946

12mo (112 x 140 mm). Half-title; a few stray spots. Original orange cloth, gilt spine, in original orange dustjacket printed in black, rear pastedown stamped "The Holliday Bookshop 49 E. 49th St., New York"; very small stray stains to jacket spine panel with tiny chip at head.

First edition, presentation copy given to the poet, writer, and artist José García Villa. Inscribed "Jose Garcia Villa Dylan Thomas" on front free endpaper. Only 3,000 copies of the first edition of Deaths and Entrances were printed, and the collection contains some of Thomas's most worthy verse, to include “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, By Fire, of a Child in London,” “Poem in October,” “In My Craft and Sullen Art,” and “Fern Hill.”

José García Villa was born in Manila in 1908, before moving to New Mexico to pursue his studies, and ultimately to Greenwich Village in New York City. There, he joined a community of modernist poets, including e.e. cummings, Marianne Moore, W.H. Auden, among others, and was affectionately known as "The Pope of Greenwich Village." He wrote his poems under the pseudonym Doveglion (a composite of dove, eagle, and lion) and was admired, according to Marianne Moore, for "the reverence, the raptness, the depth of concentration in [his] bravely deep poems." His 1933 story collection, Footnote to Youth: Tales of the Philippines and Others, was "the first work of fiction by a Filipino writer published by a major United States-based press."

He received “numerous honors and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Philippines Heritage Award, a Poetry Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, and a Shelley Memorial Award. In 1973 he was named a National Artist of the Philippines, and he also served as a cultural advisor to the Philippine government. He died in New York City on February 7, 1997.”

REFERENCE

Academy of American Poets; Villa, Doveglion: Collected Poems, ed. John Edwin Cowen

PROVENANCE

José García Villa (inscription)