JARMAN, Derek. Modern Nature.

JARMAN, Derek. Modern Nature. London: Century. 1991.

8vo. Original dark blue cloth lettered in white to the spine, in the dust-jacket designed by the Senate, priced £16.99 to the front flap; pp. [6], 314; a few very light spots to text block, spine tips a touch softened, a touch of rubbing to jacket extremities; a near fine copy in like jacket; inscribed by Derek Jarman in black ink to the front free endpaper; eleven press cuttings relating to Jarman and the book loosely laid in.

A fine, inscribed first impression of Derek Jarman’s remarkable late journals.

In 1987, shortly after discovering he was HIV-positive, Jarman bought a cottage on the Dungeness coast, in the shadow of a nuclear power station. He named it Prospect Cottage. Moving between Kent and London, where he owned a small studio flat on Charing Cross Road, the journal, beginning in January 1989 and ending in September 1990, records life at the cottage, not least the creation of a remarkable garden in the surrounding shingle. ‘Describing the garden to Maggi Hambling at a gallery opening’, he writes, ‘I said I intended to write a book about it. She said: “Oh, you’ve finally discovered nature, Derek.” “I don’t think it’s really quite like that,” I said, thinking of Constable and Samuel Palmer’s Kent. “Ah, I understand completely. You’ve discovered modern nature.”’ The diary covers the making of the 1990 film The Garden, the early stages of his adaptation of Marlowe’s Edward II, as well as his stay at St Mary’s, Paddington, after contracting tuberculosis. An heir to a great tradition of English diaries and nature writing (Dorothy Wordsworth, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Gilbert White, Denton Welch), Modern Nature offers a moving, beautifully written insight into the life of a gay, HIV-positive man and artist in England during the late, dark years of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership.

SKU: 2123108