THE GREEN WALL

New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957. First Edition. Hardcover. Near Fine in a Good dustwrapper, worn but complete but for small chips at the spine tips and corners and a long closed split between the front panel and inside flap. Exceptional Association Copy. Poet's very scarce first book, part of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, with an introduction by W. H. Auden. This copy belonged to Wright's wife, Liberty, with her SIGNATURE at the top of the front free endpaper and below that a SIGNED INSCRIPTION by the poet quoting two lines from a poem in the book, "Eleutheria," and adding a bittersweet, revealing commentary: "for Lib,/and the ground's deliberate/riches, the fallen pears, the/bewildered apples blown to/mounds of shade, and mainly/for the poison ivy, which I kept/out of the poem, not because/it didn't scan or rhyme, but/because it was the sweet/and secret root from which/the poem came./Love and grief,/Jim." Liberty Kardules was Wright's high school sweetheart and the mother of his sons Franz and Marshall. Wright left Liberty two years after publication of this book and divorced her in 1962. Franz Wright is now an accomplished poet. He and his father are the only parent/child pair to have won a Pulitzer Prize in the same category.