Field Work

By Seamus Heaney

First edition, first impression: London: Faber and Faber, 1979. Signed and Inscribed by the poet on the title page: "to George / after our turas to Rassay, / and the holy ground of Hallaig — / Seamus Heaney / 5 June 2004", the word turas underlined.

Octavo. Original brown cloth, the spine lettered in gilt. With the original pictorial dust jacket after the estate map of Glanmore, unclipped and priced £3.00 net to the front flap, the flap noting the collection as a Poetry Book Society Choice.

Near fine: a little spotting to the edges; the binding square and firm, the contents otherwise clean.

The dust jacket fine, bright and sharp, and notably unfaded.

Heaney's fifth collection, written largely at Glanmore in County Wicklow, from which the jacket takes its estate map, and containing the Glanmore Sonnets, "Oysters", "Casualty" and "The Harvest Bow".

The inscription is dated the day of the journey it records. On Saturday 5 June 2004 the Sorley MacLean Trust marked the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Hallaig clearances by bringing Heaney to Raasay for the first time. He went that day to Hallaig, the township on the island's south-eastern shore emptied of its people between 1852 and 1854 and the subject of MacLean's best-known poem, and that evening spoke at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig of his admiration for MacLean and read his own work. Heaney had written on MacLean in the London Review of Books in November 1986, describing "Hallaig" as a condensed symbolist epic, and in 2002 published his own English translation of the poem with Urras Shomhairle, the Sorley MacLean Trust, in an edition of two hundred copies. Turas, common to Irish and Scottish Gaelic, is a journey, and in Irish devotional use the pilgrimage circuit made at a holy site.