FERLINGHETTI, Lawrence. Back Roads To Far Places.

FERLINGHETTI, Lawrence. Back Roads To Far Places.FERLINGHETTI, Lawrence. Back Roads To Far Places. New York: New Directions. 1971. Small 4to. Black and white front card cover with illustration of a building in abstract white; white back card cover with black lettering; black lettering to white spine; [unpaginated]; fading to black cover; very faint indentation on top of front cover; red stamp of 'Laurence Pollinger Ltd' to end paper; otherwise near fine. First edition. Ferlinghetti's single long

FERLINGHETTI, Lawrence. Back Roads To Far Places. New York: New Directions. 1971.

Small 4to. Black and white front card cover with illustration of a building in abstract white; white back card cover with black lettering; black lettering to white spine; [unpaginated]; fading to black cover; very faint indentation on top of front cover; red stamp of 'Laurence Pollinger Ltd' to end paper; otherwise near fine.

First edition. Ferlinghetti's single long poem Back Roads To Far Places is not a translation, although it echoes a variety of Japanese poetry and Tibetan Budhist texts, collating the two to form a new, progressive American mantra. Lawrence Ferlinghetti is a heralded activist of the arts, always asserting the universality of literature and the injustice of its inassessibility to all. In 1953, Ferlinghetti established The City Lights Book Shop in San Francisco which became the epicentre for a generation of avant-garde writers as well as a publishing house of its own. Ferlinghetti’s volume of poetry Pictures of the Gone World (1955) was the first publication in the series.

New Directions was established in 1936 out of advice from James Laughlin to Ezra Pound to "do something useful". It would go on to publish names as seminal as Marianne Moore, Dylan Thomas and Ferlinghetti himself.

SKU: 2120444