Squarings. Twelve Poems. Lithographs by Felim Egan.

'SHIFTING BRILLIANCIES' SIGNED BY HEANEY AND FELIM EGAN

First edition, one of 100 copies signed by author and artist, 60 of which were for sale. Frontispiece and four further lithographs by Felim Egan. Printed on handmade Velin Arches Blanc paper. Square large 4to., original full cream natural calf with title in blind on upper cover, pale green endpapers. Dublin, Hieroglyph Editions.

A fine copy in a mid-blue Solander box, with title in silver on the spine and upper cover. 

The first separate printing of one of Heaney’s most well-loved sequences which display ‘an astonishing imaginative freedom, wholly unpredictable from Heaney’s past work” (Lachlan Mckinnon, TLS). The series of twelve line poems, essentially sonnets which have been squared off by excision of the final couplet, ‘make as real as possible the represented sensory experiences of the child, conveying their aromas and textures as though at first hand. Perhaps no poet has ever been better at this one thing… The minute and crabbed always opens out into “infinity,” whose dimensions are only glimpsed from the confines of a room, the arbitrary boundaries of a game of marbles or a short poem in regular stanzas’ (Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker). 

Heaney described his collaboration with Felim Egan, one of Ireland's leading abstract artists, as “an attempt to catch at something fleet and promising”, and on reading Egan's artist's statement, one can see exactly why his work caught the poet's eye: “soft squares and wobbly circles, plotted arbitrarily as the stars appear to be, working on a way to make these incongruous icons and fragments blend but never completely . . . in many ways, a reflection of the chaotic world we live in, trying to make a sense of it all through the language of painting”.

Stock Code: 121662