Crow. From the Life and Songs of the Crow.

Limited first edition thus. Large 4to. 123pp. Quarter-bound black buckram over blue-grey cloth boards with bevelled edges, lettered in gilt to spine. Rough-cut lower and fore-edges, burgundy endpapers, red top stain. With twelve full-page and one half-page b/w drawings by Leonard Baskin. No. 399 of a limited edition of 400 copies. Printed at the John Roberts Press, in Pegasus type designed by Berthold Wolpe, on T.H. Saunders mould-made paper. Housed in a black card slipcase with a pink label printed in black. Expanded edition with a further three new poems added to the seven of the augmented sixth printing of 1972: 'Crow Rambles', 'Crow's Courtship', 'Crow's Song about Prospero and Sycorax'.

Author's fourth book of poems for adults. Written mostly between 1966 and 1969, Crow heralded an ambitious second phase in Hughes's oeuvre, lasting roughly from the late sixties to the late seventies, when he turned from direct engagement with the natural world to unified mythical narratives and sequences. Drawing from various world mythologies, the Old Testament, and aboriginal legends, he originally conceived Crow as an epic folk-tale, a prose narrative with interspersed verses.

The subject itself was suggested by the American artist, Leonard Baskin, his idea being the making of a composite book of texts and engravings, to be printed on his Gehenna Press. Dedicated to the memory of Assia Wevill and their daughter Shura whose deaths by asphyxiation in March 1969 brought the Crow poems to an abrupt halt, Hughes had embarked on the sequence following a fallow period after the suicide of Sylvia Plath.

In a 1985 article, he elaborated about the genesis of his best-known work and self-acknowledged masterpiece: "Crow grew out of an invitation by Leonard Baskin to make a book with him simply about crows. He wanted an occasion to add more crows to all the crows that flock through his sculpture, drawings, and engravings in their various transformations. As the protagonist of a book, a crow would become symbolic in any author's hands. And a symbolic crow lives a legendary life. That is how Crow took off".

"English poetry has found a new hero and nobody will be able to read or write verse now without the black shape of Crow falling across the page." –Peter Porter

[Sagar & Tabor A25c]