Kavanagh (Patrick)  Recent Poems. 1958, self-published, quar...

Hammer

€3,800

Kavanagh (Patrick)  Recent Poems. 1958, self-published, quarto limp green cloth, untitled, ‘hand set in 12 pt Egmont Light & printed on a hand press in an edition of 25 copies of which this is no. 10’, signed (at rear) Patrick Kavanagh, also signed on t.p. dated Dec. 1958, and inscribed in Kavanagh’s hand, ‘For Elinor & Reggie / April 1959.’

With errata sheet, manuscript corrections in Kavanagh’s hand on p. 5, 11, 12, 14 and 20 (only the first and second listed on the errata sheet). Some browning on pp. 24-5 (from a press cutting of the same poem laid in), else a fine copy.

Kavanagh’s last, rarest and most desirable collection, including his fine elegy ‘In Memory of My Mother’, and his apologia, ‘If ever you come to Dublin town’:

‘He knew that posterity has no use
For anything but the soul,
The lines that speak the passionate heart,
The spirit that lives alone,
O he was a lone one,
Fol dol the di do,
Yet he lived happily
I tell you.’