FIELD WORK

First edition, first printing. Hardcover issue. Publisher's original brown cloth with gilt titles to the spine, in the dustwrapper, the front panel reproducing a map of Glanmore, Co. Wicklow. A fine copy, the binding square and firm, the cloth and gilt bright and fresh. The contents are clean throughout and without inscriptions or stamps. Complete with the fine original dustwrapper that remains bright and, very unusually with this title, without any fading to the spine. Not price-clipped (£3.00 net to the front flap). A particularly lovely copy.

Following 'North' (1975), in which Heaney dealt most explicitly with the "Troubles", it was four years until 'Field Work' emerged. The later book reflects Heaney's move away from Belfast to a cottage in Glanmore, rural Wicklow and "an attempt [...] to change the note and to lengthen the line". The book, more sombre than its predecessor, includes a number of elegies, love poems, as well as the series of 'Glanmore Sonnets'. The volume concludes with 'Ugolino', the poet's rendering of Cantos 32-3 of Dante's Inferno. 3,000 copies of the hardback and 12,000 of the paperback edition were published on 15 October, 1979. (Brandes and Durkan, A20a.).