Very scarce with such attributes

Hughes, Ted ~ Wolfwatching : Inscribed In The Year Of Publication By The Author To His Daughter

Faber, London : 1989

The First UK printing published by Faber London in 1989. This is the hardback edition and was only issued in a small print run. There was also a wraps edition issued simultaneously. The BOOK is in near Fine condition with just a hint of toning to the text-block and extreme page edges. The WRAPPER is complete and is in near Fine condition with just a little edge-wear with light rubbing at the spine ends and corners. The wrapper is protected in a removable Brodart archival cover. The book has been warmly inscribed by the author to the front end-paper, to this daughter Frieda and Clive (her husband at that time) : 'For Frieda and Clive, with love Daddy, 9th October 1989'. 'Wolfwatching occupies a curious place in Ted Hughes’s poetry. Uniquely among his later books, Wolfwatching forms no single sequence or structure, and its mixture of closely observed nature poems (‘Macaw’, ‘The Black Rhino’) and harrowed fixations on the First World War (‘Source’, ‘For the Duration’), glued together with reaching metaphysical enquiries (‘Astrological Conundrums’, ‘Take What You Want But Pay For It’) recalls the loose structures of his earliest books. What 'Wolfwatching' might lack in topical unity, however, it more than makes up for in its tonal unity, as poem after poem dramatises dissipation and waste, whether the post-war torpor of Calder Valley residents, or the titular wolf, watched in its cage in a London zooery' (David Troupes, The Ted Hughes Society 2021). Very scarce with such attributes.

BINDING: Hardcover
CONDITION: Near Fine
JACKET: Near Fine