RICH

Limited edition. One of 21 copies produced by Brian Dickson, Production Manager at Faber and Faber. First edition. Finely bound in tan cloth with a white paper label lettered and ruled in black affixed to the front panel. A fine copy, the binding square and firm, the pages uncut and untrimmed. With typescripts of two of the poems in the book.

One of 21 numbered copies bound by Brian Dickson from sheets of the first edition. This copy is number 8, and is from the library of Frank Pike, former editor at Faber and friend of the poet. Loosely laid in are two poems from the collection in typescript, the title poem and 'Plain Song', the latter typed on a Faber Memorandum page, dated 24th October 1982 and addressed to "St Frank of Assisi", its subject "This Prize-Winning Poem". From the 1960s onwards, Pike was responsible for the Faber drama list, recruiting Tom Stoppard, Simon Gray, Brian Friel, Sam Shepard, and Alan Bennett, among others, as well as working closely with authors already publishing with the firm, notably Samuel Beckett. 'Rich' was Raine's third full-length collection of poems and the first to be published by Faber and Faber ('The Onion, Memory' (1978) and 'A Martian Sends a Postcard Home' (1979) were issued by Oxford University Press). At the centre of the collection, between the poems, there is a short prose memoir (a gentle nod to Lowell's 'Life Studies' [1959]).