HUGHES, Ted. Moortown Diary. London: Faber and Faber 1989.
Tall 8vo. Black cloth with white title lettering to spine; red and black illustrated dust jacket; pp. xi, [1], 68, [1]; slight crease to dust jacket flap; otherwise fine.
First edition of the revised version of the 1979 original. Affectionately inscribed to Nick Grant, "For Nick/with love/Ted/19 August 1989".
Moortown Diary is a poetry diary or "farming sequence", first published in 1979, written in a time span of several years during which Hughes spent every day in nature, either gardening or farming. Hughes married Carol Orchard, a farmer's daughter, in 1970 and Ted and his father-in-law, Jack Orchard, ran Moortown farm near Winkleigh in Mid Devon. This revised version contains an emotional tribute to Jack Orchard, who died in 1976 and Hughes writes in the Preface that he pieced together these poems for his wife, as a memorial to her father. He confesses, "altering any word felt like retouching an old home movie with new bits of fake-original voice and fake-original actions".
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