HEANEY, Seamus.

£750 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Hailstones. First edition, presentation copy, inscribed by Heaney on the title page to the Orkney poet George Mackay Brown (1921-1996), "George - Sláinte - Seamus, 12/12/84". The two poets met in 1968, and their subsequent friendship was characterised by mutual admiration. Brown wrote that Heaney was a "master" at "the supreme art of making simple events not only memorable but immortal", while Heaney wrote of Brown: "W. H. Auden once called poetry 'a way of happening' and in the work of George Mackay Brown the way is a fabulous one; he transforms everything by passing it through the eye of the needle of Orkney. His sense of the world and his way with words are powerfully at one with each other. His vision has something of the skaldic poet's consciousness of inevitable order, something of the haiku master's susceptibility to the delicate and momentary, and since the beginning of his career he has added uniquely and steadfastly to the riches of poetry in English." Following Brown's death, Heaney wrote a haiku, "A Landfall", published in the memorial volume Dove-Marks on a Stone (1996): "Far north, in sunlight, / the stone ship ran aground. Larks / sing at the masthead."As well as the title poem, which first appeared in the previous month's LRB, Hailstones includes the first printings of nine poems, eight of which were later collected in The Haw Lantern (1987). This is one of 500 copies in wrappers; there were also 250 copies bound in cloth and signed by the author.

Found via Rare Books Intel, a search across rare-book dealers, auction houses and marketplaces worldwide.