Poem or Book that I found in a thrift shop in Brooklyn NY

[ecafehcuod]

IV

For My Wife



Leafing through these pages, as I do now,

finding our legend in a ghostly phrase —

to Lillian—thinking of coming days

when readers read as I do: —knowing how



the love, the thought, the kiss, the worless vow

that holds us each to each in speechless ways

is lost already in this wordy maze

where we are only what cold words allow—



I say it's all unsaid and lasts nowhere.

And so we talk ourselves to double death

to live and die in lifeless words again,



shadows of shadows, even now bare

of everything but our abiding faith

to live in others, as I in Lillian.

https://imgur.com/gallery/vN4mm7a picture of the page

Comments

[quillori]

I think it may be from Sonnets of Love and Liberty by Walter Lowenfels (published by Blue Heron Press in 1955). Quite an interesting guy - check out his wikipedia article.

[(Anonymous)]

I think you may be right, It looks like I’ll have to order the book to find out because I can’t find much of his work online at all. How in the world did you figure that out?

[delacourtings]

i know the book has already been found but i did some more digging and i'm even more sure quillori is right about it being sonnets of love and liberty.

i searched for the book on worldcat which lead me to a search-only digital copy from the hathitrust digital library where i searched some of the words from the poem (wife, lillian, and ghosted) and the results showed each of those terms was on the same page (page 21) so i'm pretty positive the poem is in that book.

you're right, it looks like his work isn't really available digitally but the places i saw selling the book seemed kind of shady (amazon had a listing for it for over 800 dollars but another site had it for about 6 dollars and neither had a picture with the listing) so you might be better off using worldcat to see if it's available at a library near you (if you just want to read the book and not own it)!

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you so much. I really don’t know how I would’ve found this book. I’ve spend countless hours trying to track it down.

[quillori]

Very similarly to delacourtings - there was nothing online to find by regular googling, but if you go to google advanced book search and put one of the lines in as an exact phrase it brings up exactly one hit. There isn't even snippet view, so I couldn't see context, but checking up on the author it was clearly a book of his own poems, not an anthology he edited, and his wife was indeed called Lillian so it looked like it was most probably the correct solution.

If you're in the US, Better World Books is selling a copy for $7.38 and free shipping through Amazon (£3.90 plus £9.00 shipping through Amazon UK, $10.48 plus (possibly free) shipping to Europe through their own site), and AbeBooks also has it for £5 from The Poetry Bookshop: Hay-on-Wye, with about the same again in shipping to Europe. Both of those are fairly reputable, although I think the Better World Books one is ex-library, and I have known them take a fairly liberal approach to what classifies as good rather than merely acceptable condition, so I suspect the Poetry Bookshop copy (listed as fine and with a specific description) is in better shape. But the Better World Books one won't be that bad, and will be cheaper and quicker if you're in America.

[fred_mouse]

Better World Books, while they can be great, have also stuffed up more orders for me than just about anyone else combined -- including cancelling without notification. AbeBooks, on the other hand, while typically more expensive, and occasionally having the wrong cover image (only an issue if you are after a specific edition, as I was) has never stuff up and order.

[(Anonymous)]

Walter Lowenfels, "Sonnets of Love and Liberty"!

[(Anonymous)]

Oops didn't see that it had been found!