Poetic Signatures
Sometimes you stumble across remarkable things in the stacks. This can include books or pamphlets which have been signed by literary figures who have attained mythical status bordering on deification. Such is the case with the two items presented here, both from the extensive poetry collection held at Exeter Library and both slim privately pressed volumes of great preciousness. Amongst the Ted Hughes books with their Faber and Faber covers and illustrations by Leonard Baskin is interleaved a thin booklet, rather ageworn and bearing the stains of careless use or incautious storage. It's a reprint of an early poem published in 1957, from an age before Hughes was lionised as a literary giant and demonised by some who chose to cast him as villain in their mythologised script of a real life tragedy. The historical subject of The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar might have seemed an appropriate one to revisit. It certainly had a personal resonance for Hughes in that Bishop Farrar, a martyr fr