The Hawk in the Rain

First edition. Slim 8vo. 59, [1]pp. Publisher's blue cloth, lettered in yellow to spine. 1/2,000 copies printed.

Sans the dust jacket. Slightly tanned to backstrip, light spotting to endpapers, former ownership signature to f.f.e.p., else Very Good.

The Choice of the Poetry Book Society. Winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, the Galbraith Prize, and the New York Poetry Centre First Publication Award (by Harper and Row). Author's first book, a collection of 40 poems on the themes of competition and the struggle for survival, dedicated 'to Sylvia' [Plath].

The dedicatee, who considered her husband's poetry the "most rich and powerful since that of Yeats and Dylan Thomas," had typed out almost all his poems and submitted them to the Poetry Centre, as The Hawk in the Rain. On behalf of her fellow judges, W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, Marianne Moore summed up their decision: "Hughes' talent is unmistakable, the work has focus, is aglow with feeling, with conscience; sensibility is awake, embodied in appropriate diction". (ODNB)

[Sagar & Tabor A1a]