COLLECTED POEMS

First edition, first printing. Signed by the author. Quarter blue cloth over cream marbled boards, lettered in gilt to the spine. Complete with matching slipcase. A very near fine copy, the binding square and firm, the boards bright and fresh. The contents are clean throughout and without previous owner's marks. There is a tiny nick / mark to the outer edge of two pages, visible to the fore-edge of the page block. The slipcase is in fine condition. Signed Limited Edition.

Signed by Derek Mahon in black ink to the limitation page at the front of the book. This page states that one hundred and twenty-five copies of the edition were specially bound and signed: fifteen copies, numbered I-XV, reserved for the author and publisher, and one hundred and ten copies, numbered 1-110, for trade. This copy is unnumbered. Like Yeats, Auden, Marianne Moore, and Robert Lowell before him, Mahon was an inveterate reviser of his poems. The volume, as the jacket copy for the standard trade edition stated, brings together "in updated form" the poems the author wishes to preserve from the work of forty years. As Hugh Haughton notes in his fine study of the poet (Oxford, 2010), the wording suggests that for Mahon revision was "not only a question of his critical conscience, but a desire to re-situate [...] past work in the cultural present." As such, the volume boldly and unapologetically prints the poems without any indication of publishing history, provenance, or chronology (the contents, however, are given in roughly chronological order).