EC0070

The Arion Press, San Francisco, 1983. Single sheet of Saunders mould-made paper folded once to form four 9 by 6 inch pages. Color vignette by Warren Chappell.


"In World War I, thousands of copies of a single little book survived in the coat pockets of dead soldiers. It was Rilke’s epic poem, The Lay of the Love and Death of Cornet Christopher Rilke, a work now little known and often dismissed as juvenilia. The eponymous Cornet is a 19-year-old apocryphal ancestral cousin of Rainer Maria’s who fought and died in the 17th century war with the Hussars. The poet Rilke was young and full of romantic, creative power when he discovered evidence, in family documents, of the forgotten Christopher." Lisa Bielawa