MEDLEY FOR MORIN KHUR

First edition, first printing. Signed by the author. Limited edition. Letterpress printed and hand-bound at The Stonehouse Fine Press on 125 gsm Canaletto paper. Original plain card wraps with a colour marbled paper dustwrapper, lettered in black to a paper label affixed to the front panel. A very near fine copy, the binding square and firm, the contents clean throughout. In the dustwrapper, showing the merest wear to tips and folds. A nice copy.

Issued in a limited edition of 175 copies, this example is numbered 153 and signed by Paul Muldoon in black ink to the limitation page at the rear. The short title-poem, named after a traditional Mongolian horsehead fiddle, acts as a prelude to the thirteen sonnet sequence 'Horse Latitudes' which Muldoon began writing at the start of the 2003 war in Iraq. "The poems", Muldoon explains in his note, "have to do with a series of battles (all beginning with the letter 'B' as if to suggest a 'missing' Baghdad) in which horses or mules played a major role. Intercut with those battle-scenes are accounts of a 'battle' with cancer by a former lover, here named Carlotta, and a commentary on the agenda of what may only be described as the Bush 'regime'". The poet's full-length 2006 Faber collection was named after the sequence (where it also appears).