CREDITING POETRY: The Nobel Lecture.

First UK edition, first and only printing. One of five hundred copies printed for Faber and Faber by Smith Settle, Otley, West Yorkshire, for private circulation (it was preceded by an Irish trade edition issued by Gallery Books in December 1995). Inscribed by Seamus Heaney to Frank Pike, editor at Faber and Faber and friend of the poet. Original stitched blue card wrappers in an emerald green dustwrapper lettered in black and white to front and rear panels. A near fine copy, the binding firm, the contents clean throughout. Minor marginal creasing to the left margin near the spine. The dustwrapper, with the same light crease and a touch of rubbing to the extremities, is otherwise in very good shape. A nice association copy.

Inscribed in black ink by the author "To Frank / who ever credited it. / Seamus 12. ii. 96". 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. Heaney's Nobel lecture was delivered before the Swedish Academy on 7 December 1995 to mark his winning the Nobel Prize in Literature earlier that year. A very personal retrospect of a life dedicated and devoted to poetry, its final sentence speaks of "poetry's power to do the thing which always is and always will be to poetry's credit: the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable, in so far as they, too, are an earnest of our veritable human being." (Brandes and Durkan A64b.)