HEANEY, Seamus & Rachel GIESE [Photographer]~ Sweeney’s Flight. Signed by the author.

FIRST UK PRINTING. Faber and Faber, London: 1992.

Large 8vo., full dark green cloth, decorated in gilt to spine with publisher's device to foot; dark cream endpapers; together in the unclipped photographic dustwrapper (£20.00 net); with 35 black and white photographs throughout, taken by Giese; THE BOOK aside from very faint rubbing to the boards, fine; THE WRAPPER fine. The wrapper is protected in a removable Brodart archival cover. First UK edition, first printing. Signed by Seamus Heaney to the title page. A collection of poems based on 'Sweeney Astray', Heaney's interpretation of the Irish poem 'Buile Suibhne' published by him in 1983. The medieval tale speaks of Suibhne mac Colmáin, King of the Dál nAraidi, who is driven insane by a curse and leaves battle to spend years wandering the Irish landscape. Heaney's edition won the 1985 PEN Translation Prize for poetry, and extracts are published here with revised stanzas. The text is accompanied by atmospheric black and white photographs by the American photographer Rachel Giese. Giese was born in raised in New York City, but began traveling to Ireland in the late 1970s, drawn to the light, the weather, and the history. In 1987 she published 'The Donegal Pictures', which Heaney (who wrote the introduction) described as "attend[ing] to the speechless life in things and places and people. Donegal is not only recorded here, it is reimagined.” The present book was published in the same year in which Giese moved to Ireland, "Seamus became interested in what I was doing" she later said in an interview with Muriel Adrien, "he asked if I would like to collaborate on a revised edition of Sweeney Astray, his book-long adaptation of an ancient Irish text about the life of Sweeney, one of Irish myth's hero/anti-heroes (much is paradoxical in Irish literature), that he had previously published, this time with photographs. I spent about 4 years working on this project and it was finally published in 1992. I knew both Heaney's text and the Ulster landscape well and it was a joy to do." The atmospheric images show an array of Irish landscapes including stone formations, misty coastal scenes, mountains and waterfalls. Of the new collaborative version, Heaney notes in his introduction "a poem is never completed, merely abandoned." Scarce.

BINDING: Hardcover
CONDITION: Fine
JACKET: Fine