London: Horizon 1944. First edition, one of 1000 copies printed on Barcham Green handmade paper by the Curwen Press, of which 500 were bound in cloth in dust jacket and 500 in wrappers; this copy marked “not for sale” by the author. Presentation copy, inscribed by Connolly on the half-title page to the American poet Dunstan Thompson: “Dunstan from Palinurus – Nov. 29, 44” and with nine holograph corrections to the text by Connolly. Thompson was one of the most provocative and promising young American poets in New York in the early 1940s, and the flamboyant gay editor of the short-lived magazine Vice Versa, which the twenty-two year-old Harvard drop-out edited with his friend Harry Brown. Dana Gioia, in “Revisiting Vice Versa”, noted the editor’s “passionate conviction that poetry mattered.” Of Thompson’s “Encyclical” in the first issue of Vice Versa, Gioia wrote: “If Thompson’s savagely satiric tone now seems a bit too cocky and self-important, his clear and courageous statement of artistic principles still radiates a refreshing idealism.” – “Revisiting Vice Versa”, in Dunstan Thompson: On the Life & Work of a Lost American Master. Edited by D. A. Powell & Kevin Prufer. (Warrensburg, MO.: The Unsung Masters Series at Pleiades Press, 2010), p. 102. Thompson emigrated to England during the war, and later reverted to Catholicism, abandoning his previous life-style while maintaining a chaste domestic relationship with his life-long partner, Philip Trower. Thompson published two books of poetry, Poems (1943) and Lament for the Sleepwalker (1947), both repudiated by their author in later years, a few novels and a travel book. Thompson continued to write poetry, however, and his later work was privately published in Dunstan Thompson: Poems 1950-1975. Thompson died of liver cancer in 1975. The Unquiet Grave is one of the most civilized, and civilizing, of modern books, a compilation of the “doubts and reflections of a year” on “art, love, nature and religion”. Begun in 1940, “The Unquiet Grave,” as Connolly reflected ten years later in the introduction to the revised edition, “is inevitably a war-book.” Although it was an attempt “to extricate himself from the war and to escape from his time and place into the bright empyrean of European thought,” it was also an attempt to alleviate “a private grief - a separation for which he felt himself to blame … a struggle against propaganda … and an optimistic determination to prove how near and necessary to us were the minds and culture of those across the channel who then seemed quite cut off from us, perhaps forever. To evoke a French beach at that time was to be reminded that beaches did not exist for mines and pill-boxes and barbed wire but for us to bathe from and that, one day, we would enjoy them again.” “As a signal of distress from one human being to another The Unquiet Grave went unanswered, but the suffering was alleviated. As a demonstration of the power of words, however … the work was an object-lesson. … ‘La pensee console de tout’.” Virtually the entire book is quotable, a fact to which Ernest Hemingway attested when he wrote: “It is a book which, no matter how many readers it will have, will never have enough”. Connolly published Thompson’s poetry in Horizon. 8vo, frontispiece and 3 illustrations, original printed wrappers. Top portion of wrappers lightly sunned, but a very good copy.