Kaddish and Other Poems 1958–1960

First edition. Pocket Poets Series, Number Fourteen. 12mo. 100 pp. Black and white wrappers, priced $1.50 to back cover. The correct first issue bound in sewn signatures (subsequent editions were perfect bound). With Villiers Press imprint on p. 100, 10-line publisher's statement to rear cover, as called for (later printings replaced this with a 23-line statement by the author). [Bill Morgan in his descriptive bibliography of The Works of Allen Ginsberg, 1941–1994 affords first printing status to the 7-line back cover statement issue, with no mention of the Villiers imprint, in contradiction to Ralph and Lori Cooks' earlier and much more widely cited City Lights Books: A Descriptive Bibliography]. 1/2,500 copies printed.

Wraps slightly soiled, creased spine faintly sunned, else very good.

A long, complex elegy inspired by Ginsberg's inability to perform the kaddish ceremony and addressed to his mother, Naomi – a long-term resident at Greystone mental hospital – whose posthumously received letters provide the poem's key lines. It was composed from 1957 through 1959 in San Francisco, Paris and New York, most of it in a single, intense, forty-hour session. "A terrible masterpiece." –Robert Lowell

[Cook, City Lights Books 30, pp. 42–3; Dowden pp. 8–9; Morgan A4.a2]