COLLECTED POEMS by Seumas O’Sullivan

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The Orwell Press, 1940, Dublin. Of this edition 300 copies have been printed.

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Provenance:  from the library of Irish poet William Monk Gibbon. This copy is inscribed and signed by O’Sullivan to Gibbon.

Size: 19,8 x 12,8 cm. Pp. 226, 1, 1l blank.

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Binding: Hardcover in cloth bound, in very good dust jacket.

Condition: Fly leafs browned, otherwise a fine copy.

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For condition and details, please see the scans. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us.

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Seumas or Seamus O’Sullivan, real name James Sullivan Starkey, (17 July 1879 – 24 March 1958) was an Irish poet and editor of The Dublin Magazine. He was born in Dublin and spent his adult life in the suburb of Rathgar. In 1926 he married the artist Estella Solomons, sister of Bethel Solomons. His books include Twilight People (1905), Verses Sacred and Profane (1908), The Earth Lover (1909), Selected Lyrics (1910), Collected Poems (1912), Requiem (1917), Common Adventures (1926), The Lamplighter (1929), Personal Talk (1936), Poems (1938), Collected Poems (1940), and Dublin Poems (1946). Seumas O’Sullivan and B.J. Brimmer Company were accredited within the ‘Acknowledgments’ of People and Music by Thomasine C. McGehee – Published via Allyn and Bacon within the Junior High School Series, ed. by James M. Glass, 1929 and 1931 respectively – for both (the frontispiece) In Mercer Street and the excerpt from Ballad of a Fiddler (page 93) His father William Starkey (1836-1918), a physician, was also a poet and a friend of George Sigerson.

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William Monk Gibbon (1896 – 29 November 1987) was an acclaimed Irish poet and writer who authored over 20 volumes of poetry, travel, autobiography, and criticism. He was known as “The Grand Old Man of Irish Letters” and his works are housed at Queen’s University Belfast. Gibbon was also a prolific novelist but was characterized as “self-regarding and prickly.” He was the son of a Church of Ireland clergyman and served as an officer in France during World War I before becoming an avid pacifist. He was involved in the Easter Rising of 1916 and wrote a detailed account of the shooting of pacifist Francis Sheehy-Skeffington in his book, Inglorious Soldier. Gibbon knew and had intimate accounts of many famous Irish writers, including William Butler Yeats, whom he had a tense relationship with. He married Mabel Dingwall, and their home, Tara Hall in Sandymount, County Dublin, was a literary center frequented by writers such as Padraic Colum and Austin Clarke. Gibbon was an avid cyclist and often wrote in bed, collecting driftwood on his walks to the seafront. His notable works include The Seals, Mount Ida, and The Masterpiece and the Man: Yeats as I Knew Him.