Imagined Meetings with the Poets of the Past
HEANEY, Seamus. Station Island. London: Faber and Faber. 1984.
8vo. Original black cloth, spine lettered in gilt, in the Pentagram-designed dust-jacket printed in red and black, front flap priced £5.95 net; pp. [3]–123, [1 (blank)], bound without front free endpaper, i.e. pp. 1–2 (as with all copies of the first hardback printing); small scuff to foot of upper board, a few pale dampstains to interior of jacket; else a fine copy in like dust-jacket; title-page signed by Heaney.
Signed first edition, first printing of Heaney’s first volume following Field Work (1979), centred around its title sequence, described as ‘a sequence of dream encounters with familiar ghosts’ and set on the eponymous island in Lough Derg, Co. Donegal.
One of Heaney’s finest achievements, the sequence stages a series of encounters with figures from the poet’s own past, alongside imagined meetings with earlier Irish writers – William Carleton, Patrick Kavanagh and, above all, James Joyce. The sequence, deeply in-debted to Dante, frequently employs the Italian poet’s signature terza rima.
Flanking the sequence are a series of shorter lyrics and ‘Sweeney Redivivus’, where, follow-ing Sweeney Astray (1983), the poet’s voice once again merges with ‘the seventh-century Ulster king who was transformed into a bird-man and exiled to the trees by the curse of St Ronan.’
Brandes & Durkan A36a.
SKU: 2124805