The Dead Seagull.

BARKER, George.

Item Number: 126719

London: John Lehmann, 1950.

First edition of Barker’s rich and poetic novel. Octavo, original cloth. Very good in a good dust jacket. Jacket design by Humphrey Spender.

The Dead Seagull if a work of great originality, a poet's novel written with the richness of color, the concentrated violence of style that have distinguished George Barker's verse. It is a tragedy, told more as it might be poured out in the confessional of a Roman Catholic Church than the more traditional modes of the English novel. Its subject is love: but it is also original sin, in the sense that Cardinal Newman once wrote, "We are all implicated in some dreadful aboriginal calamity." The theme of The Dead Seagull is that this calamity is love itself.