A FREE TRANSLATION

Second impression. Paperback edition (simultaneous with the hardback). Publisher's card wrappers lettered in black to the spine, front and rear panels. The front cover also reproduces, in red, Henri Matisse's "Loulou in a flowered hat". Inscribed by the author to Frank Pike, drama editor at Faber and Faber. A very near fine copy, the binding square and firm, the spine without creasing, the contents clean throughout. The wraps showing the merest surface wear. A very nice copy.

Inscribed by the author in blue ink to the half title "To Frank, / lots of love / Craig". The recipient, Frank Pike, was an editor at Faber and Faber for 41 years, and from the 1960s onwards 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, including John Osborne and Samuel Beckett. 'A Free Translation' prints six new poems (they would later appear in Raine's 1984 collection 'Rich', [Faber, 1984]). The poet James Fenton (brother of Tom Fenton, the proprietor and printer of The Salamander Press) provides a brief note printed on the back cover: "Craig Raine has set a new style and standard for his contemporaries. He has taught us to become strangers in our familiar world, to release the faculty of perception and allow it to graze at liberty in the field of experience. His first two collections established his place among the tiny number of poets of whom one asks with some eagerness: What will they write next? His imitators are to be seen at work in most places where verse is published. Yet a comparison between the imitators and the original will show how difficult are the effects which Mr Raine manages with such apparent ease. The crucial quality is this: Mr Raine's poems are discoveries, or collections of discoveries. That is what makes this new volume a source of such delight."