TALES

46pp, 6 coloured woodcuts, pictorial cover design by Skotnes

The cover is marked and edge worn and there is a small tear at the bottom of the spine. There is a previous owner's signature on the FEP. Internally the book is in very good condition with sound binding, bright woodcuts and no obvious marks.

21 Poems by Sinclair Beiles. Original woodcuts by Cecil Skotnes

Produced by Bernard Sachs. Foreword by Stephen Gray.

Dust jack flap:

Sinclair Beiles, one of South Africa's leading poets, first emerged on the international literary scene in Paris in the late fifties. He was published by Two Cities Editions, Olympia Press and one of the leading English publishing houses, John Calder. In the early sixties he began to be widely known in America through publication in numerous literary magazines. With novelist William Burroughs, h worked on the first book of Cut-Up Poetry, Minutes to Go... His Ashes of Experience, brought out in 1969, was generally acclaimed as a major contribution to new South African poetry, and it won him the Ingrid Jonker Memorial Prize for poetry for that year.

The present volume, Tales, is a collection of Sinclair Beiles's most recent work, and is a considerable advance on anything he has done before. 

Cecil Skotnes is one of South Africa's leading artists. He has exhibited extensively in Europe and the Americas and has made a major contribution to th development of art in the Republic since the Second World War. He has received the Transvaal Academy's gold medal in 1966, the South African Breweries Biennale gold medal in 1968 and in 1972 was awarded a gold medal at the Third International Graphic Exhibition in Florence, Italy.

Stephen Gray Foreword:

Sinclair Beiles is a legend that lives and accretes. I tried to find him in Europe, but each time he was frontiers in the other direction. Then he was in the doorway of a travel agent in Athens – his straw hat much deformed by wind and tide clung on; under his arm booksellers' bargains, a 1930s volume on schizophrenia, a two-decker Victorian handbook on how to civilise the world by means of croquet. Sinclair grins...

We drink lemonade and eat yoghurt. He has 400 poems stashed away; he has just written one in memory of Ingrid Jonker. He remembers her, he sits back quietly and tearful...

He is extremely pleased that his collaboration with Cecil Skotnes had resulted in the woodblocks that illustrate the Tales... Here they are then. They will amuse South Africa, coming from this prodigal, generous vagabond, who's never washed off his South African youth.