NORTH

First edition. One of 25 copies bound by Brian Dickson from sheets of the first edition, each with a hand-written colophon page. Finely bound in sage-green three-point canvas with a white paper label lettered and bordered in black affixed to the front panel. A very near fine copy, the binding square and firm, the contents, with many pages remaining uncut, clean and bright throughout. The spine is a little faded. A sharp copy of a very uncommon volume.

One 25 copies, bound by Brian Dickson from sheets of the first edition discovered in the Faber and Faber warehouse in 1981, each with a hand-written colophon page. Most were given to Seamus Heaney for distribution among friends. This copy is from the library of Frank Pike, editor at Faber, who over four decades, from the 1960s, onwards 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. Heaney's engagement with, and treatment of, the politics of Northern Ireland – with "the Troubles" – was marked by characteristic subtlety, intelligence and a sense of responsibility to a subject at once personally and historically sensitive. It was in 'North', his fourth full collection, that he approached the matter most forcibly and unambiguously. Following two lyric poems dedicated to his aunt, Mary Heaney, are two extended sections, the first approaching the Northern Irish experience through the historical and geographical lens(es) of Northern European myth, ritual and violence (and including the extraordinary group of poems drawing upon Heaney's reading of P.V. Glob's study of the recently excavated, eerily preserved, ancient Bog People), the second, a series of more personal poems. Christopher Ricks wrote of 'North' that "by bending itself to deep excavations within the past of Ireland and of elsewhere, [Heaney achieves] a racked dignity in the face of horrors. The poems [are] truly enlightened". Originally published 9 June, 1975 in both hardback and paperback editions, the Faber archives do not record the number of hardback copies printed. (Brandes and Durkan A12a.)