Dannie Abse A STRONG DOSE OF MYSELF First Edition Signed
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Dannie Abse A STRONG DOSE OF MYSELF First Edition Signed
First edition, first print hardback of A STRONG DOSE OF MYSELF, by Dannie Abse and published by Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers) Ltd., London in 1983. Signed by Abse on the title page.The book is in very good condition (Clean brown cloth boards with silver lettering on spine) with only slight wear to the pictorial dust jacket, which is not price clipped (minor creasing to the edges and tiny nicks to three of the corners). Internally, the pages are clean and tight and there are no tears and no other inscriptions.
Abse was born in Cardiff, Wales, to a Jewish family. He is the younger brother of politician and reformer Leo Abse and the eminent psychoanalyst, Wilfred Abse. Abse first studied medicine at the University of Wales College of Medicine, and then at Westminster Hospital Medical School and King's College London. Although best known as a poet, Abse worked in the medical field, and was a specialist at a chest clinic for over thirty years. He has received numerous literary awards and fellowships for his writing. In 1989, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Wales. His first poetic volume, After Every Green Thing, was published in 1949. His autobiographic work, Ash on a Young Man's Sleeve, was published in 1954. He won the Welsh Arts Council Award in both 1971 and 1987, and the Cholmondeley Award in 1985.
He has been a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature since 1983. For several years he wrote a column for the "Ham & High" (Hampstead and Highgate Express) local newspaper. The articles were subsequently published in book form. In 2005, his wife Joan Abse was killed in a car accident, while Abse suffered a broken rib. His poetry collection, Running Late, was published in 2006, and The Presence, a memoir of the year after his wife died, was published in 2007; it won the 2008 Wales Book of the Year award. The book was later dramatised for BBC Radio 4. He was awarded the Roland Mathias prize for Running late. In 2009 Abse brought out a volume of collected poetry. In the same year, he received the Wilfred Owen Poetry Award. Abse was a judge for the inaugural 2010 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine. Abse was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2012 New Year Honours for services to poetry and literature.
";What they want,' said Thoreau to visiting lecturers in the USA, ;is a strong dose of yourself. It doesn't matter what sort of darn fool you happen to be.' With this quotation Dannie Abse introduces this 'warts and all' mosaic of a self-portrait. If he is a 'fool', then Dr Abse is a wise and humorous one, as this variety of writings on his life and medicine and letters amply demonstrates..
Those who enjoyed his classic early autobiographical novel, Ash on a Young Man's Sleeve, and his later book, A Poet in the Family, cannot but be seriously entertained by this further, more experimental, exercise in autobiography. The poet's affectionate yet shrewd view of this native Wales is counterbalanced by pieces about his life in America and London, and sometimes controversial attitudes to medicine are complemented by personal pieces about contemporary poets and poetry."
220 pages.
ISBN: 0 09 151260 3
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Dannie Abse A STRONG DOSE OF MYSELF First Edition Signed