Death of a Naturalist. London: Faber & Faber, 1966. Second Impression. Pp, 57. Green cloth boards in publisher’s dust jacket (salmon and white, lettered in black). A nice bright copy.

Heaney’s inaugural collection & first major work in hard back which won the Cholmondeley Award, the E.C. Gregory Award, the Somerset Maugham Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in year of publication. A year earlier he published a collection in wrappers entitled ‘Eleven Poems’ while still a student in Queen’s University, Belfast.

‘His words give us the soil-reek of Ireland, the colourful violence of his childhood on a farm in Derry. The full-blooded energy of these poems makes Death of a Naturalist the best first book of poems I’ve read for some time.’ – C.B. Cox in the Spectator