Broadside of ‘Scaffolding’, with watermark signature.
Over the past year, we’ve been working with the Dublin-based fine art print studio, Stoney Road Press, on a very special project.
We have chosen five of Seamus Heaney’s best-loved poems – ‘Digging’, ‘Scaffolding’, ‘Clearances iii’, ‘Lightenings viii’ and ‘Postscript’ – to create a series of beautifully produced, limited-edition broadsides, hand-printed on custom-made paper and watermarked with the poet’s signature. The design of these prints is clean and simple – so that the words of the poem take centre-stage – with each title picked out in a different colour.
Our thinking in initiating this project was two-fold. Firstly, we felt we were following in a tradition of sorts: at various points in his career, Seamus worked with small publishers and presses on broadsides and limited-edition prints of his poems. On occasion, these were commemorative, as in the case of the 2009 collaboration with his friend, the painter Barrie Cooke, when they worked with the Irish Museum of Modern Art and Stoney Road Press to produce two prints to mark his 70th birthday – ‘The Gutteral Muse’ and ‘In the Boathouse’. At other times, these projects were a way of fostering relationships with small presses or publishing an uncollected poem. And sometimes they were simply another way of giving the work life beyond the pages of a book – a way of letting people engage with a poem in a fresh or unexpected way. It’s in this spirit that we have produced the current series, focusing on poems that we hope will resonate with long-time readers and newcomers alike.
We’re also delighted to share this beautiful reading of ‘Postscript’ by actor Ruth Negga. Ruth played Antigone in the Abbey Theatre’s original 2004 production of Seamus’s play The Burial at Thebes, so we are happy to celebrate that connection and we’re grateful for her support of the project.
The poems are presented in a simple cardboard folder, featuring a photograph of the poet by Irish photographer John Minihan on the inside cover (with thanks to UCC Library and Archives). Each poem comes in an edition of 250 and they can be purchased individually (for €175 incl. VAT) or the set of all five poems (€575 incl. VAT).