THE TESTAMENT OF CRESSEID & SEVEN FABLES

First trade edition, first printing. Signed by the author. Publisher's original blue boards with gilt titles to the spine, in the Seb Lester lettered and illustrated dustwrapper. A fine copy, the binding square and tight, the contents clean throughout. Complete with the lightly creased dustwrapper that is without fading, loss or tears. Not price-clipped (£12.99 to the lower front flap).

Signed by Seamus Heaney in black ink on the title page. A decade after his Whitbread award-winning version of 'Beowulf', Heaney moved ahead a few centuries to the fifteenth century and Robert Henryson's narrative poem set in the aftermath of the Trojan War, a work that completes the story told in Chaucer's great 'Troilus and Criseyde' a century earlier (Henryson explicitly acknowledges Chaucer and employs the earlier poet's stanza form). The volume is completed by Heaney's versions of seven of Henryson's verse fables. In the introduction, Heaney describes Henryson as "a poet whose knowledge of life is matched by the range of his art, whose constant awareness of the world's hardness and injustice is mitigated by his irony, tender-heartedness and ever-ready sense of humour."