HEANEY, Seamus. Squarings SIGNED LIMITED EDITION

Illustrated by Sol LeWitt. San Francisco, Arion, 2003. Square quarto. pp. 126. Printed by letter-press on a Miller cylinder press on mould-made paper from the Magnani Mill in Italy. Grey cloth. Edition limited to 400 numbered copies, signed by the author and the artist. Fine in slipcase.
Heaney's 'Squarings' first appeared in 'Seeing Things', published in 1991. On the page the poems are squarish in shape, made up of twe1ve lines, in four three-line stanzas. The poems are organised into subdivisions of four dozens, named Lightenings, Settings, Crossings, and Squarings. Le Witt responded to the poetry by making forty-eight drawings in the summer of 2003, each six inches square. The works build on underlying grids of straight and not-straight (wavy) lines, either horizontal or vertical, in four schemes. The book, designed by the publisher Andrew Hoyem, is correspondingly squarish, with a page size of 255 x 275mm. The poetry was handset in a square area, the same size as the drawings opposite. The binding was done by hand in the Arion bindery using gray cloth over boards, bearing a design that is an enlarged reference to the straight and curved lines underlying the Le Witt drawings, and enclosed in a darker gray cloth slipcase with Publisher prospectus laid in.