NEW COLLECTED POEMS

First edition, first printing. Signed by the author. Quarter burgundy 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. The slipcase is also in fine condition.

Signed by Derek Mahon in black ink to the limitation page at the front of the book. One hundred and forty copies of the edition were specially bound and signed: fifteen copies, numbered I-XV, reserved for the author and publisher, and one hundred and twenty-five copies, numbered 1-125, for trade, of which this copy is numbered 17. Like Yeats, Auden, Marianne Moore, and Robert Lowell before him, Mahon was an inveterate reviser of his poems. Like the earlier 'Collected Poems' (1999), this updated edition, which includes poems published subsequently (but also changes the ordering of the 1999 volume), brings together, as the jacket copy of the standard trade edition stated, "in new form", the work the author wished to preserve from the work of fifty years. As Hugh Haughton notes in his fine study of the poet (Oxford, 2010), such 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).