Unquiet World - The Life of Count Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk

Poet, polemicist, pagan, pretender to the throne of Poland - and one of the great eccentrics of the twentieth century.

Count Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk was one of the glittering generation of New Zealand poets which included his friends A.R.D. Fairburn and R.A.K. Mason. But his career took a strange turn in 1932 when - after a celebrated trial in London at which he was supported by Leonard and Virginia Woolf and many of the leading writers of the day - he was sentanced to six months in Wormwood Scrubs for publishing an obscene poem. He became increasingly eccentric: dressing in mock-medieval garb, claiming the throne of Poland, and issuing a stream of pamphlets from his base in the South of France - before returning to New Zealand in the 1980s and 90s.

UNQUIET WORLD is the first time the full story of this facinating but fugitive figure has been told. More than a biography, it provides illuminating insights into the literature of obscenity, the history of censorship, fringe right-wing politics and private press publishing - and is also a beautifully written memoir of an emerging writer's engagement with a subject that is intensely personal as well as of central cultural signifigance.

- from the back cover.

Published by Victoria University Press, 2001.
Good secondhand condition.