STATIONS

First edition, first printing. Signed and dated by the author. Original stapled yellow card wrappers designed by Peter Middleton, with Fay Godwin's pixelated photograph of the author's face and orange lettering to the front panel. A near fine copy, the binding firm, the wrappers, with just a touch of rubbing to the extremities and minor creasing to the inner margins of the rear panel (around the spine fold). An attractive copy.

Signed and dated "25 September 1986" in blue ink by Seamus Heaney to the title page. Although unmarked as such, this copy is from the library of Frank Pike, drama editor at Faber and Faber and the poet's friend. The prose poems of 'Stations' were, the author writes in a brief preface (Glanmore, March, 1975), "begun in California in 1970/71 although the greater part of them came rapidly to a head in May and June last year. The delay was partly occasioned by the appearance of Geoffrey Hill's Mercian Hymns: what I had regarded as stolen marches in a form new to me had been headed off by a work of complete authority. But a second, less precisely definable block was in the air when I came back to Belfast: those first pieces had been attempts to touch what Wordsworth called "spots of time", moments at the very edge of consciousness which had lain for years in the unconscious as active lodes of nodes, yet on my return a month after the introduction of internment my introspection was not confident enough to pursue its direction. The sirens in the air, perhaps quite rightly, jammed those other tentative if insistent signals. So it was again at a remove, in the "hedge-school" of Glanmore, in Wicklow, that the sequence was returned to, and then the sectarian dimension of that pre-reflective experience presented itself as something asking to be uttered also. I think of the pieces now as points on a psychic turas, stations that I have often made unthinkingly in my head. I wrote each of them down with the excitement of coming for the first time to a place I had always known completely." (Brandes and Durkan A10)