The Haw Lantern

First edition. Crown 8vo. Pp. [xii], 51, [1 (blank)]. Brick-red cloth boards, lettered in silver to spine. Priced £7.95 net to the front flap of dust jacket.

Signed by Heaney to front free endpaper. Tanning to page edges, as usual, else fine in a fine dust jacket.

Author's eighth poetry collection. Winner of the 1987 Whitbread Prize for Poetry. Thirty-one poems exploring the theme of loss – including a celebrated sonnet sequence concerning the death of the poet's mother – joined by meditations on the conscience of the writer and exercises in an allegorical vein. Awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. "Intimate, tender, erotic. Mr Heaney is a poet of exclusion; he knows just what to leave out in order to let the reader in." –Mark Rudman, The New York Times Book Review

[Brandes & Durkan A41a]