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116 THOMAS, Dylan. Deaths and Entrances. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd, 1946 inscribed to a fellow poet and White Horse Tavern regular First edition, first impression, a rare presentation copy, inscribed by the author to his friend on the front free endpaper, “Jose Garcia Villa Dylan Thomas”. This is a superb association: the two poets moved in the same circle, and Thomas remained an abiding influence on Villa’s poetry. José García Villa was born in Manila in 1908. In 1929 he published a series of erotic poems called “Man-Songs” in the Philippines Herald Magazine and was fined for obscenity and suspended for a year from law school. That same year, his short story “Mir-i-nisa” won a prize of 1,000 pesetas, which he used to travel to the United States. He published a collection of stories, Footnote to Youth: Tales of the Philippines and Others , with Scribner in 1933. He then moved to the Greenwich Village, where he was the only Asian poet in the modernist community that included e. e. cummings, Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden, and devoted himself to poetry written under the pseudonym Doveglion (Dove, Eagle, Lion). His poetry won him many awards and fellowships, as well
as positions at New Directions, CUNY, and the New School. Villa and Thomas were both regulars at the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village and were both promoted early in their careers by Edith Sitwell. One of the most widely-circulated photos of Villa is of him at Thomas’s funeral in 1953, and his 1954 poem “Death and Dylan Thomas” appears in many anthologies. Deaths and Entrances includes “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, By Fire, of a Child in London,” “Poem in October,” “In My Craft and Sullen Art,” and “Fern Hill”. “The little square book contains some of the best war poetry (from the home front) and Thomas’s incantatory descriptions of his childhood. His romantic, regional and religious standpoint is here combined with his surrealist manipulation of language to produce his greatest work” (Connolly). Sextodecimo. Original orange cloth, spine lettered in gilt, fore and bottom edges untrimmed. With dust jacket. Bookseller’s ticket to rear pastedown. A superb copy, in the fresh, bright jacket, tiny closed tear to head of spine. £17,500 [150715]
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