First edition, one of 1,000 copies signed by the author. Larkin’s poem ‘The Explosion’ – widely held to be one of his finest – was composed between 1969 and 1970, and completed on 5 January 1970. The poem draws upon Larkin’s memories of reading D.H. Lawrence’s descriptions of mining villages as a teenager, which were revived by watching ‘a television documentary about the mining industry […] during Christmas 1969’ (A. Motion, Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life (London, 1994), pp. 394-395), while his experiences of the destruction wrought by the Coventry Blitz of 1940-1942 also inform it. The poem has some echoes of Thomas Hardy’s ‘In the Time of the “Breaking of Nations”’, and Andrew Motion believed that ‘in “The Explosion” an accident had reaffirmed the need for continuity’ (op. cit., p. 395).
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‘The Explosion’ was first published in the ‘Poem-of-the-Month’ series, which comprised 48 broadsheets issued between 1970 and 1977, each bearing a poem or poems by a leading writer and signed by the author at the foot. Larkin wrote to his friend Judith Egerton on 18 March 1970 that ‘today [I] learnt [“The Explosion”] will be “Poem of the Month” for June or July: have you heard of this new racket? Five pounds a year, & you get a new unpublished signed poem by C. Day-Lewis, Roy Fuller, Stephen Spender, John Betjeman, Laurie Lee, & others including yours truly flopping onto your doormat each month – better than having the authors themselves so flopping, anyway’ (A. Thwaite (ed.), Selected Letters of Philip Larkin 1940-1985 (London, 1992), p. 428). ‘The Explosion’ was reprinted in The Listener (17 August 1972), and first appeared in book form in High Windows (1974), as the poem which closes the collection.
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This copy is from the library of the noted British engineer and designer Tony Divey, who worked for Lotus, DeLorean, Porsche, and other companies, before establishing his own business, Triking Sports Cars to manufacture and sell the Triking three-wheeled sports car which he designed.
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B.C. Bloomfield, Philip Larkin (2002), A9.
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