A Boy Driving His Father to Confession. Surrey: The Scepter Press (Frensham), 1970. Limited Edition. Pp, 12. Plain stiff titled wrappers, short biography on rear endpaper. A nice bright copy.

Limited Edition of 150 Numbered Copies (#47), copies Numbered 1 to 50 Signed by Seamus Heaney. 

First published in ‘Phoenix’, March 1967 and is reprinted here with revisions.

A confessional poem, previously uncollected, explores a son’s Oedipal animosity and his rejection of his father’s Catholic rituals. Influenced by Robert Lowell in both its form (heroic couplets) and its content, the piece was workshopped with the Belfast Group in April 1965. This informal collective of students, faculty, and local writers gathered at the home of Philip Hobsbaum, a lecturer at Queen’s University.

The thematic significance of the father is further emphasised by the inclusion of three additional poems on the subject—‘Digging,’ ‘Follower,’ and ‘Ancestral Photograph’—in Heaney’s debut collection, Death of a Naturalist, the following year.

[Brandes & Durkan A7].