HEANEY, Seamus.
Eleven Poems.
Eleven Poems.
Stock Code 104305
Belfast, Festival Publications, 1965
From the collection of J. Kenneth Jamison (1931-2016), Director of the the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and Heaney's friend, who was instrumental in putting on the event that brought Heaney, Longley, and Hammond together on the stage to perform their poems and songs at venues across Ireland. The very first poem, 'Personal Helicon (For Michael Longley)' (whose work appeared in the same Festival Publications series) in its opening and closing lines ('As a child, they could not keep me from wells / and old pumps with buckets and windlasses. / I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky' and 'I rhyme / to see myself, to set the darkness echoing') prefigures the Nobel Prize acceptance speech that Heaney would make 30 years later, 'I credit [poetry] ultimately because [it] can make an order as true to the impact of external reality and as sensitive to the inner laws of the poet's being as the ripples that rippled in and rippled out across the water in that scullery bucket fifty years ago. An order where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew. An order which satisfies all that is appetitive in the intelligence and prehensile in the affections. I credit poetry, in other words, both for being itself and for being a help, for making possible a fluid and restorative relationship between the mind's centre and its circumference.'
First edition, second 'issue' (with the ten-point sun symbol); single octavo quire; internally clean; publisher's stapled self wrappers printed in black & light purple. A very nice copy.
Brandes & Durkan A1b.
Couldn't load pickup availability
Provenance
Provenance
Delivery
Delivery
We offer secure and express delivery on all local and international orders of rare books, maps and prints placed through this website.
About us
About us
Shapero Rare Books is an internationally renowned dealer in antiquarian & rare books and works on paper.
Our Bookshop and Gallery can be found in the heart of Mayfair at 94 New Bond Street, where most of our stock is available to view and on public display.
We exhibit at major international art fairs, including TEFAF (Maastricht and New York), Frieze Masters, Art Miami and Masterpiece London, as well as antiquarian & rare book fairs including New York, Paris, London, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Hong Kong.