BROWN, George Mackay; Ted HUGHES, Seamus HEANEY; Christopher FRY. Four Poets for St Magnus.

Celebrating a Kirkwall Kirk

BROWN, George Mackay; Ted HUGHES, Seamus HEANEY; Christopher FRY. Four Poets for St Magnus. Orkney: The Breckness Press. 1987.

Folio. Original parchment-backed maroon pictorial boards, spine lettered in gilt; beige endpapers; housed in the publisher’s green cloth slipcase with pictorial label to upper panel; pp. [48], five tipped-in facsimile manuscript pages, one page with two lithographic illustrations by Bryce Wilson depicting stone sculptures in St Magnus Cathedral; a fine, as-new copy; signed by George Mackay Brown, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, and Christopher Fry to the colophon.

A beautifully produced celebration of St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall, Orkney, no. 49 of 100 copies signed by all four contributors.

Published on St Rognvald’s Day, 20 August 1987, by Elizabeth Graham Scarth at The Breckness Press, Orkney, Four Poets for St Magnus was issued to mark the 850th anniversary of the founding of St Magnus Cathedral, the oldest church in Scotland and the northernmost cathedral in the United Kingdom. 100 copies were printed, of which 85, numbered 1–85, were for sale, numbers 1–5 were individually bound, and 15 copies, lettered A–O, hors commerce. The volume was designed by Ron Costley and printed for The Breckness Press by the September Press, Wellingborough, Northants, and Smith Settle, Otley, West Yorkshire.

‘The great stone ship [the Cathedral] is still there’, George Mackay Brown – the only native Orcadian among the contributors – writes in his introduction to this handsomely produced volume, ‘headed forever east into sunrise and springtime, throwing from her prow the years and the episodes, the strivings and the triumphs and the failures of what we call history.’ His aptly titled ‘The Kirk and the Ship’ is the first of the four poems, each accompanied by a facsimile of the poet’s manuscript tipped onto the page preceding the printed version. Ted Hughes’s contribution, ‘The Zodiac in the Shape of a Crown’, subtitled ‘What the Starry Heavens Sang to His Royal Highness Prince William On 21st July 1982’, was written several years before Hughes became Poet Laureate but remained unpublished until the present volume; it was not included among the Laureate poems subsequently published in Rain charm for the Duchy, or in his posthumous Collected Poems. Seamus Heaney’s sonnet ‘In Memoriam’ had appeared a few months earlier as ‘In Memoriam: Robert Fitzgerald’ in The Haw Lantern (1987) The volume concludes with Christopher Fry’s translation of the ‘Hymn at Lauds’, from the ‘Horæ in festo Magni comitis martyris’ (The [canonical] Hours on the feast of Magnus, Count and Martyr), together with the original Latin text.

Brandes & Durkan B86

SKU: 2126352