Bunch Grass by Sund, Robert - 1969

Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969. First printing. (86) pp., 5.5 x 8 inches. Sewn signatures glued into printed card covers, in printed dust-jacket. With tipped-in photograph and inscription by Mary Randlett.



Robert Sund’s first book, written for the most part in the summer of 1963, after hearing the news that his mentor Theodore Roethke had died, and while working in the wheat harvest near Walla Walla, Washington. As suggested by the title, the poems and short prose pieces herein are preoccupied with that place, the Palouse of Western Washington, and the lifeways of its inhabitants.

Mary Randlett was a major Northwest photographer noted equally for her depictions of the region’s landscapes and architecture, and her portaits of its artists; she was also one of Sund’s best friends. He appears as one of the “Northwest luminaries” in the collection Mary Randlett Portraits (University of Washington, 2014), along with Roethke, Henry Miller, Morris Graves, Imogen Cunningham, Tom Robbins, and others.

In this copy of her dear friend’s first book, inscribed in the year of publication to her mother, Randlett has included an original photograph taken in the same area explored by Sund in the text. Her inscription reads: “for Mother, with love always — Mary / the photograph is of the Ennis grain elevator where some of this poetry was created — September 23, 1969.”

Other than a small and unobtrusive stain on the top edge, and the inevitable offsetting from the photograph, a fine copy, with a marvelous and important association.