{"product_id":"heaney-seamus-hendrix-jan-the-light-of-the-leaves","title":"Heaney, Seamus; Hendrix, Jan. The Light of the Leaves.","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cb id=\"docs-internal-guid-035eb0aa-7fff-5eb0-2d35-30a604696c35\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eAn elegiac collaboration in silver leaf. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBanholt, Netherlands: In de Bonnefant, 1999.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eOversize folio in two parts. Principal volume: ten poems in English with facing Dutch translations by Peter Nijmeijer; four full-page screenprints by Jan Hendrix on Nepalese paper, one in silver foil and three in black and white; quarter cloth over natural white Japanese-paper boards, small screenprint inset to upper cover. Companion booklet: ten of the screenprints reduced to approximately 7 × 11 cm on a silver ground, printed black paper wrappers. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e \u003cb id=\"docs-internal-guid-035eb0aa-7fff-5eb0-2d35-30a604696c35\"\u003eL\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cb id=\"docs-internal-guid-035eb0aa-7fff-5eb0-2d35-30a604696c35\"\u003eimited edition. This is #25 of seventy copies\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cstrong style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003e \u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cspan style=\"font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'San Francisco', 'Segoe UI', Roboto, 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif; font-size: 0.875rem;\"\u003enumbered 1–63, with seven copies hors de commerce, the full edition. Signed by Seamus Heaney and Jan Hendrix on the limitation. Companion volume signed by Hendrix.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eIn the summer of 1998, within twelve weeks of each other, Zbigniew Herbert and Ted Hughes died. Joseph Brodsky had gone two winters before. Seamus Heaney, who had loved them all and counted Hughes in particular as a kind of elder brother of the craft, had already begun the elegies that would become this book; what remained was to find them their proper room. He found it in Banholt, a village in the south of Limburg where Hans van Eijk had been operating In de Bonnefant since the early 1980s. Van Eijk was a printer of grave taste and patient method, and his books had a way of arriving in the world looking as though they had been waiting there a long time.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eHeaney had worked with him once before, on \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Golden Bough\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003e (1992)—a partial translation of Aeneid Book VI undertaken in memory of the schoolmaster who had first set Virgil before him. That earlier Bonnefant book had been illustrated by Jan Hendrix, the Dutch artist long resident in Mexico, who brought to the project the cactuses and stony plateaus of Yagul, a fortified pre-Columbian settlement in the Tlacolula valley of Oaxaca. Hendrix had been introduced to Heaney by the Mexican painter Francisco Toledo, and the three of them—poet, artist, printer—understood the book as a kind of devotional architecture. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Golden Bough\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e had its cactuses struck in gold leaf. Once it was finished, they began planning its companion.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eIt took seven years to arrive. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Light of the Leaves\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003e keeps the Yagul landscape and the silver-leafed Nepalese paper of its predecessor, but the imagery has darkened. Where the earlier book had been a journey out, this one is a turning back: the cactuses appear here in deep black against a luminous silver ground, panoramic and unpeopled, “as if standing on the great rock watching over the surrounding valleys,” in Hendrix’s later phrase. Heaney, writing about the artist a decade afterward, described the imagery as opening into “profound recesses of lightness and darkness.” The phrase describes the elegies equally well.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eHeaney travelled to Oaxaca in the autumn of 1999 to launch the book at the Instituto de Artes Gráficas, where he is reported to have compared Ireland and Mexico as lands “created by romantic artists out of their mythologies and the history of their invasions.” Hendrix returned to Yagul more than once in the years that followed, and when he and Heaney began their third and final collaboration—the full \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eAeneid Book VI\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003e, abandoned at the poet’s death in 2013 and published posthumously in 2016—he noticed that the cactuses he had drawn in 1992 and 1999 were beginning to die out. He vowed not to return after the last book was finished.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Light of the Leaves\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003e sits between the gold of \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Golden Bough\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003e and the dark of \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eAeneid Book VI\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003e as the middle panel of a triptych whose subject was always, in the end, the same: the descent, the speaking with the dead, the labour of bringing back word. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Glenn Horowitz Bookseller","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47871235424430,"sku":null,"price":5000.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0571\/6325\/1886\/files\/Heaneyimage1.jpg?v=1779136644","url":"https:\/\/shop.glennhorowitz.com\/products\/heaney-seamus-hendrix-jan-the-light-of-the-leaves","provider":"Glenn Horowitz Bookseller","version":"1.0","type":"link"}