The Oblivion Ha-Ha: Sixty Poems by James Tate. 1970 Atlantic-Little Brown, first paperback edition, 92 pages. Tate was a Pulitzer and National Book award-winning poet.  According to his obituary in the Guardian: "James Tate . . . was one of the most original and inventive American poets of his era, whose sense of humour and love of the tall story calls to mind an earlier Missouri-born master of the fable, Mark Twain...An iconoclast and an original, Tate won both the Pulitzer prize and the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams award for his Selected Poems of 1991, the National Book award for Worshipful Company of Fletchers (1994), and the Wallace Stevens award (1995)." Oblivion was his second book.

Condition: VG, some browning on back cover

"O the wedding cake and the good cigar!

O the souvenir ashtray!"