03.17

Modest Gifts: Poems and Drawings. New York: Random House, 23 October. 275 pp. $14.95.

Dedication: “To Norris.” Soft cover. A reprint of the majority of Mailer’s poems (some revised) from two earlier works: his 1962 collection, Deaths for the Ladies (and Other Disasters) (62.3), and his 1966 miscellany, Cannibals and Christians (66.11), along with a suite of eight new poems collectively titled “Hemingway Revisited.” The Hemingway poems also appeared in Paris Review (see 03.28). Interspersed with the poems are about 100 of Mailer’s captioned and humorous line drawings, some of which are obliquely related to the poems. He also includes is introduction to the 1971 soft cover edition of Deaths for the Ladies published by New American Library (71.31).

“ These pieces, for the most part, will be comprehensible on first approach. Some barely qualify as poems. They are snippets of prose called short hairs, there to shift your mood a hair’s width. ” — Norman Mailer, 03.17

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