KAVANAGH, Patrick. Ploughman and Other Poems (Rare first edition of Kavanagh’s first work)

London: Macmillan, 1936. pp. 35. Printed stitched wrappers, a little sun-tanned and frayed, otherwise a very good copy. Exceedingly rare. Printed at the University Press, Edinburgh by R. & R. Clark. Green wrappers lettered in purple within an ornamental border. Some mild toning to spine and edges, light foxing to prelims as usual. A very good copy. Rare.

First edition of Patrick Kavanagh’s first published book, issued as part of Macmillan’s Contemporary Poets series (priced at one shilling). The poems, drawn from his life as a small farmer in Inniskeen, County Monaghan, marked the beginning of one of the most distinctive voices in 20th-century Irish poetry.

This modest production, printed on laid paper with its fragile green wrappers, was largely ignored on first publication. Fewer than 500 copies are thought to have been printed and many were remaindered or discarded, making survival in collectible condition scarce.

The collection includes some of Kavanagh’s earliest and most significant poems, such as Ploughman, Mary, The Goat of Slieve Donard, Dark Ireland, and Morning. Kavanagh’s unadorned, rural idiom stood in sharp contrast to the prevailing Yeatsian mode, earning him both criticism and admiration.

Copies in the original wrappers, as here, are particularly desirable; the book is regarded as one of the foundation stones of modern Irish poetry.

[L4 8F]