NEW COLLECTED POEMS

First edition. Hardcover issue. Signed by the author. Publisher's original black cloth with gilt titles to the spine, in the Charles Tyrell illustrated dustwrapper. A fine copy, the binding square and tight, bright and fresh. The contents are clean throughout and without previous owners' marks. Complete with the fine original dustwrapper that is without fading, loss or tears.

Signed by Derek Mahon in black ink on the title page. Like Yeats, Auden, Marianne Moore, and Robert Lowell before him, Mahon was an inveterate reviser of his poems. Like the earlier 'Collected Poems' (1999), this updated edition, which includes poems published subsequently (but also changes the ordering of the 1999 volume), brings together, as the jacket copy states, "in new form", the work the author wished to preserve from the work of fifty years. As Hugh Haughton notes in his fine study of the poet (Oxford, 2010), such wording suggests that for Mahon revision was "not only a question of his critical conscience, but a desire to re-situate [...] past work in the cultural present." As such, the volume boldly and unapologetically prints the poems without any indication of publishing history, provenance, or chronology (the contents, however, are given in roughly chronological order). The first edition was published in simultaneous paperback and hardcover editions, on 12 May 2011.