THE HARE AT PENNANT. A Poem.

First edition. Recent craft binding of half brown morocco and brown cloth boards, with light brown morocco titles and a down of hares illustration inlaid in light brown morocco to the upper and lower boards. Housed in the felt-lined brown buckram solander box, with gilt titles to the backstrip. Textured endpapers. With a black and white frontispiece by Willy Pogany and a wood engraving of a hare by Colin See-Paynton to the title page, with a further six small black and white wood engravings by See-Paynton throughout. Seven tissue guards are loosely laid in. Binders blanks to the rear. A near fine copy, the binding square and firm, with a little bowing to the board ends, and some tiny marks to the lower board. The contents, with a couple of spots to the fore-edge of the closed text block and some light offsetting from the illustrations, are otherwise clean and without inscriptions or stamps. Complete with the near fine, structurally sound solander box.

Ruth Bidgood (1922-2022) was a Welsh poet and local historian, best known for her 2011 Roland Mathias Prize winning poetry collection 'Time Being'. A former coder in the Women's Royal Naval Service during the Second World War, Bidgood's decades-long literary career spanned a total of fifteen volumes of poetry, and she continued to write into her 90s. "Her great subject was the "green desert" of mid-Wales, the harsh landscape, standing stones, crumbling churches, neglected gravestones and abandoned slate mines. It was inexhaustible. Her "rush-ridden valley" was not pretty but something that could swallow "the bones of your life"" (The Guardian, 2022). Her poem here, presented in a craft binding, retells the Welsh folkloric tale of Melangell (or 'Monacella' in Latin, Bidgood uses both) a former Irish princess hiding in seclusion in the wilderness of the Kingdom of Powys. During a hunt, a prince (unnamed in the poem, identified in the afterword as Brochfael Ysgithrog) is led to discover Melangell by his hounds in pursuit of a hare under her protection. Struck by the maiden's dignified appearance and sensing a certain sanctity about her in connection to the wilderness, the prince grants her land to create a sanctuary for the people and animals of the area. Considered the patron saint of hares, Melangell's association with the animal remains strong today, so much so that locals continue to avoid hunting hares in Pennant Melangell, in keeping with the centuries-old tradition.