Eleven Poems.

Belfast: Festival Publications,, [November 1965]. A rare inscribed first issue of Heaney's first separately published work First edition, first issue (with the nine-point sun symbol), of Heaney's rare first published work, presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the reverse of the front wrapper, "For Brendan & Pat: with every good wish, Seamus". The recipients, Brendan and Pat McCrystal, first met Heaney at their engagement party. The party was hosted by the principal of St Colmcille's Secondary School, Crossgar, Co. Down, and one of the English teachers, Marie Devlin, brought her then boyfriend (and later husband), Seamus Heaney. Both Brendan McCrystal and Heaney had links with St Joseph's Teacher Training College in Belfast, and the McCrystals and Heaneys maintained a friendship throughout the 1960s. Heaney's first published work includes a printed notice regarding his "first book of poems, 'Death of a Naturalist', due from Faber, Spring 1966". Several popular Heaney pieces first appeared in Eleven Poems, including "Personal Helicon" and "Death of a Naturalist". In Heaney's 1995 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he stated "I credit [poetry] ultimately because [it] can make an order as true to the impact of external reality and as sensitive to the inner laws of the poet's being as the ripples that rippled in and rippled out across the water in that scullery bucket fifty years ago. An order where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew. An order which satisfies all that is appetitive in the intelligence and prehensile in the affections. I credit poetry, in other words, both for being itself and for being a help, for making possible a fluid and restorative relationship between the mind's centre and its circumference." In the opening poem of this debut collection, "Personal Helicon", Heaney prefigures the theme of his Nobel lecture by 30 years: "As a child, they could not keep me from wells / And old pumps with buckets and windlasses. / I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky... I rhyme / To see myself, to set the darkness echoing". Octavo. Original wrappers, wrappers lettered in black, front wrapper with vignette in purple. Ownership label of Brendan & Pat McCrystal to front cover with minor loss to corner, some light browning throughout, some marks to covers, minor tears to head and foot of spine: a very good copy. Brandes & Durkan A1(a).