MONTAGUE, John; Nuala Ní DHOMHNAILL; Paul DURCAN; Seamus HEANEY [Foreword]; Donnell DEENY [Preface]
The Poet’s Chair. The First Nine Years of the Ireland Chair of Poetry.
Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 2008
8vo., publisher’s navy blue boards, spine lettered in white; together in the pictorial dustwrapper designed by Niall McCormack; pp. [iv], v-xiv, [ii], 3-264, [ii]; a fine copy in the very good plus dustwrapper which has some light creasing to the upper edge and a couple of small marks to the lower panel.
First edition, with full number line 1-10. Reportedly printed in a run of 250 copies, this copy stamped 224 to one of the rear endpapers. Neatly signed by both Seamus Heaney and Donnell Deeny to the title page.
Published to celebrate a decade of the Ireland Chair of Poetry, which was established following Heaney’s Nobel Prize in 1998. “Every three years a poet of honour and distinction is chosen to represent the Chair as Ireland’s Professor of Poetry” the website announces, “during their tenure the holder spends a year attached to each of the three universities [Queen’s, Trinity College and University College Dublin] and resides for a period of approximately eight weeks at each. While in residence, the poet gives informal workshops or readings, spends time working with students and performing outreach work and makes one formal presentation a year, usually in the form of a lecture.” (irelandchairofpoetry.org). The present work brings together a series of those lectures, and covers subjects as diverse as translation, ‘Kismets’ and the concept of the ‘Hag’ and the ‘Maiden’ in Irish tradition.
The title is likely taken from Heaney’s own poem ‘The Poet’s Chair’: “Angling shadows of itself are what / Your ‘Poet’s Chair’ stands to and rises out of / In its sun-stalked inner-city courtyard…”
Scarce signed thus.
MONTAGUE, John; Nuala Ní DHOMHNAILL; Paul DURCAN; Seamus HEANEY [Foreword]; Donnell DEENY [Preface]
The Poet’s Chair. The First Nine Years of the Ireland Chair of Poetry.
Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 2008
8vo., publisher’s navy blue boards, spine lettered in white; together in the pictorial dustwrapper designed by Niall McCormack; pp. [iv], v-xiv, [ii], 3-264, [ii]; a fine copy in the very good plus dustwrapper which has some light creasing to the upper edge and a couple of small marks to the lower panel.
First edition, with full number line 1-10. Reportedly printed in a run of 250 copies, this copy stamped 224 to one of the rear endpapers. Neatly signed by both Seamus Heaney and Donnell Deeny to the title page.
Published to celebrate a decade of the Ireland Chair of Poetry, which was established following Heaney’s Nobel Prize in 1998. “Every three years a poet of honour and distinction is chosen to represent the Chair as Ireland’s Professor of Poetry” the website announces, “during their tenure the holder spends a year attached to each of the three universities [Queen’s, Trinity College and University College Dublin] and resides for a period of approximately eight weeks at each. While in residence, the poet gives informal workshops or readings, spends time working with students and performing outreach work and makes one formal presentation a year, usually in the form of a lecture.” (irelandchairofpoetry.org). The present work brings together a series of those lectures, and covers subjects as diverse as translation, ‘Kismets’ and the concept of the ‘Hag’ and the ‘Maiden’ in Irish tradition.
The title is likely taken from Heaney’s own poem ‘The Poet’s Chair’: “Angling shadows of itself are what / Your ‘Poet’s Chair’ stands to and rises out of / In its sun-stalked inner-city courtyard…”
Scarce signed thus.
