MACNEICE, Louis. The Burning Perch. London: Faber and Faber. 1963.
8vo. Original burgundy cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in the typographic dustwrapper correctly priced 12s 6d to the front flap; pp. 58, [2]; a touch rubbed to spine tips, wrapper with wear, short tears and a little loss to upper spine tip, spine a little faded; a very near fine copy, in a very good wrapper.
First edition, first printing of the poet’s final, and maybe finest, collection, published a few weeks after his untimely death.
The Burning Perch was published a few weeks after MacNeice's death, aged fifty-five, following a visit to Yorkshire to record sound effects for his radio play Persons from Porlock. Insisting on going down a pothole with a BBC engineer, he developed the viral pneumonia that killed him. Although he couldn’t have known it would be his final book, the poems of The Burning Perch are varieties of parable: riddles and fables shadowed by a sense of foreboding reflected in the volume’s verse dedication to Mary Wimbush: “Forgive what I give you. / Though nightmare and cinders, / The one can be trodden, the other ridden, / We must use what transport we can. / Both crunching Path and bucking dream can take me / Where I shall leave the path and dismount / From the mad-eyed beast and keep my appointment / In green improbable fields with you.”
The late poems collected in The Burning Perch and its predecessor Solstices have been an enabling, and acknowledged, influence for later generations of Northern Irish poets (notably Michael Longley and Paul Muldoon).
Published 13 September 1963, 7,060 copies of the first impression were printed.
Armitage A32a.
SKU: 2124023