CLAVICS. The Daybooks IV.

First edition, deluxe issue, signed by the author. One of 10 copies (this copy no. 9) quarter bound in leather and with an extract from Clavic 11 handwritten by the poet to an additional tipped-in page. Illustrated with a drawing by Robert Webb after a design by Inigo Jones for Whitehall Palace, and an intaglio engraving from Comenius's 'Orbis Pictus' (1659). Publisher's original burgundy cloth, quarter-bound in brown leather and lettered in gilt to the spine. Grey Fabriano Tiziano endpapers. Illustrated with two black and white drawings. Housed in the original burgundy cloth slipcase with Eric Hosking's spectral photograph of a barn owl taking flight with a mouse in its beak inlaid on the front panel (the image is inlaid instead on the front panel of the book for the standard deluxe edition). A fine copy, the binding square and firm, the contents clean throughout, the slipcase likewise fine. This quarter bound edition notably scarce in commerce.

Signed by the author in black ink to the half title. This copy one of ten (out of an edition of 100 signed editions) quarter bound in leather and with an additional tipped-in page with an extract from Clavic 11 handwritten and signed by Hill in black ink ("Democracy is a Potemkin fiction / Anarchical Plutocracy Proliferates its gyre"). 'Clavics' is the fourth of five volumes published between 2007 and 2012 described by the author as Daybooks, a collective description which may owe something to the quicksilver immediacy of the writing, its rapid shifts between the English seventeenth century and contemporary political polemic. The volume is cast as an elegiac sequence for William Lawes, the Royalist composer who was killed at the Battle of Chester in 1645. Each of the 32 poems is laid out on the page in two parts, the first modelled on Henry Vaughan's 'The Morning Watch' (Vaughan, too, died at the Battle of Chester), the second closely resembling George Herbert's famous 'Easter Wings', together resembling the shape of a key (clavis: a key, from the Latin cl vis). The poems are characteristically dense and allusive, at once lyrical, angry, cryptic and direct.