A Green Place. Modern Poems

New York: Merloyd Lawrence Book / Delacorte Press / Seymour Lawrence, 1982. Toned jacket price-clipped and with light wear at edges, remainder spray on bottom sheet edges. 8vo. xiii, 225 pages. Illustrated by Jacques Hnizdovsky. Original cloth; dust jacket. FIRST EDITION, first printing. INSCRIBED by Smith on the front free endpaper and with a two-page note by Smith on folded card, to a correspondent who had sent Smith comments on one of his poems. Smith recounts details of his poem "The Closing of the Rodeo": I write it in 1947 when I was a graduate student at Columbia University... I looked out the window one rainy day & saw the cowboys from Madison Square Garden, which was nearby, riding down the street after their rodeo. It was a strange sad sight - symbolizing for me not just the end of this rodeo but the end of a whole way of life in this country.