Dogalypse : San Francisco poetry reading. (Inscribed and signed by Voznesensky, with an original photograph of the poet)

San Francisco, CA : City Lights Books, 1972. The Pocket Poets Series: Number Twenty-Nine. Square duodecimo (158 x 123 mm), pictorial wrappers (spine a little sunned, lower wrapper with small tear at bottom edge); a presentation copy inscribed on the half title by the poet in blue ballpoint ‘With admiration for Nin & Geoffrey – Love! – Andrei’, and with an original b/w photograph (137 x 89 mm) of the poet reading from his own collection of poems Little Woods; pp 48, with numerous b/w photographic illustrations; clean throughout.

Andrei Andreyevich Voznesensky (1933-2010) was a Soviet and Russian poet once referred to by Robert Lowell as ‘one of the greatest living poets in any language.’ One of the new wave of Russian intellectuals spawned by the Khrushchev Thaw, he performed poetry readings to sold-out stadiums around the world.

This copy of his Dogalypse was inscribed by Voznesensky for Geoffrey Dutton AO (1922 -1998), doyen of Australian letters, and his wife Ninette Dutton (Trott) OAM (1923-2007), artist, broadcaster and author, during Voznesensky’s visit to Australia for the Adelaide Festival of the Arts in 1972, where he appeared with Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg in an event billed as Poets in Person. Just a few months earlier, on 1 January 1972, Stolen Apples: poetry by Yevgeny Yevtushenko with English adaptations by James Dickey, Geoffrey Dutton, Lawrence Ferlinghetti et al. had been published by Doubleday, New York.

Provenance:

Geoffrey Dutton AO (1922 – 1998), Australian author and historian;

by inheritance to Robin Lucas, formerly Robin Dutton, wife of Geoffrey Dutton from 1985;

acquired from the above.