ASHBERY, John. Rivers and Mountains. N. Y.: Holt Rinehart & Winston (1966). First edition. One of 1000 copies printed. Kermani A10. Signed by Ashbery. Rivers and Mountains was nominated for the National Book Award by W. H. Auden, Howard Nemerov, and James Dickey. Ashbery's magnificent middle period begins with Rivers and Mountains. The verse flows, riverine, in lines consistently longer and more relaxed than in his earlier collections. "Beauty," a thing taunted and suspect in The Tennis Court Oath, cautiously returns. The book contains one of his indisputable early masterpieces, "Into the Dusk-Charged Air," the beauty of which is often noted, and rightly so, although its ominous, catastrophic undertones counterbalance this brilliantly. The book begins a procedure which will become one of the hallmarks of the middle period - the concluding of a volume with a long poem, in this instance, "The Skaters. 8vo, original cloth, dust jacket. A very fine copy