THE FIRST PUBLICATION OF ‘DUBLINESQUE’ AND ‘THE CARDPLAYERS’,
FOUR YEARS BEFORE THEY WERE COLLECTED IN HIGH WINDOWS
LARKIN, Philip Arthur. ‘Two Poems’ [i.e. ‘Dublinesque’ and ‘The Cardplayers’], in Melvin J. LASKY and Nigel DENNIS (editors). Encounter XXXV, No. 4 (October 1970), p. [41]. London: William Clowes and Sons, Limited for Encounter Ltd., 1970.
Quarto (248 x 180mm), pp. 96. Illustrations in the text and bound-in subscription card for the New Statesman. (Lightly browned due to poor paper stock.) Original colour printed wrappers. (Spine slightly faded, extremities slightly creased and rubbed.) A very good copy.
First publication. Philip Larkin (1922-1985) contributed a number of poems, articles, and reviews to Encounter, beginning with ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ in 1959 and ending with a review of Peter Ackroyd’s T.S. Eliot in 1984, a year before his death. These two poems – ‘Dublinesque’ (dated 6 June 1970) and ‘The Cardplayers’ (dated 6 May 1970) – were first published in this issue of Encounter and then collected four years later in Larkin’s High Windows (London, 1974), the final collection published during the poet’s lifetime. Here, the depiction of a funeral in ‘Dublinesque’ precedes the pastiche of ‘The Cardplayers’ (‘Jan van Hogspeuw staggers to the door / And pisses at the dark’), whereas the poems were printed in their order of their composition in High Windows.
Bloomfield, Philip Larkin (2002), C368.
£9.50
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