Charles Olson - A Nation of Nothing but Poetry. Edited by GF Butterick. H/C. 221 pp.

Signed by editor George F. Butterick, this first edition anthology of poems by the innovative American poet Charles Olson is something of a rare find. This volume consists of poems omitted from the magnificent 700-hundred page Collected Poems of Charles Olson, published in 1987 by the University of California Press.

Charles Olson was a poet and essayist with an enormous output. His work influenced numerous other writers during the 1950s and 1960s. He did not consider himself a poet or a writer by profession, but rather an archeologist of morning. In his influential essay on projective (or open) verse Olson rejected academic verse with its closed forms and alleged artifice.

First edition 1989 by Black Sparrow Press, Santa Rosa. The plastic-covered hardcover is in pristine condition, as is the rest of the book. Library and bookshop stamps and pocket on endpapers.