Cables to the Ace; or Familiar Liturgies of Misunderstanding
New York: A New Directions Book, 1968. First edition. Octavo, original black cloth, spine title stamped in white, original dust jacket. About Fine in a price-clipped dust jacket. Item #1632
"OVER THE DOOR OF HELL IS WRITTEN: 'THEREFORE!'"
First edition of Cables to the Ace—Thomas Merton's work of modern anti-poetry—an "animated mosaic of experiment, parody and dour meditation." Published in hardcover and paperback issues.by New Directions, Cables to the Ace was one of the final books published during Merton's lifetime. An excellent copy of the preferred hardcover binding.
Dedicated on the half-title to Robert Lax (Merton's old Columbia University friend), this collection demonstrates the evolution of Merton's poetry. "Merton's restrained and metrical verse in Thirty Poems (1946), loosens, in Original Child Bomb (1962) and Cables to the Ace (1968), into blocks of expository prose and discontinuous visionary fragments that...reel between religious ecstasy and prophecies of nuclear apocalypse" (James Matthew Wilson). Consisting of a Prologue (dated, "May 1967"), 88 numbered passages, and an Epilogue, Merton confronts modernity ("Listening is obsolete. So is silence") and reveals himself as "an anguished bystander in need of peace and salvation the same as everybody else" (James Matthew Wilson). Merton situates his book within the margins of Catholic orthodoxy: "At first sight it may look subversive but it can safely be given as a Twelfth Night present, without the slightest fear of damage, to anyone, even Catholics." Wilson. The Catholic Imagination in Modern American Poetry.
Price: $100.00