Hendrix - Heaney, Aeneid Book VI

Private View and Aeneid Book VI launch

Tuesday 24 January 2017, 6.30pm - 8.30pm

reading of The Golden Bough by Matthew Hollis, Poetry Editor, Faber & Faber

introduced by Catherine Heaney

In conversation 

Saturday 28 January, 11.00am - 12.00pm with Detmar Blow

To reserve your place at either event contact gallery@maestroarts.com.

Towards the end of the seventies Jan Hendrix came across a slim volume of Heaney’s poetry: Death of a Naturalist. He was immediately hooked and made a series of prints based on Lovers on Aran.

After a hesitant correspondence the two artists finally met at a Poetry International in Rotterdam in 1993, a firm friendship was formed and they went on to collaborate on two books; The Golden Bough (1992) and the Light of Leaves (1999). Hendrix was living in Mexico and Seamus and Marie travelled with him to Yagul in Oaxaca, it became a place explored artistically by both Heaney and Hendrix.

The Aeneid Book VI, is a farewell to Seamus and Yagul, but in Jan's words... it feels good, a cycle coming to an end, Book VI is all about father and son, death, the underworld and afterlife, it's great storytelling.

The collaboration on the volume started when the two bumped into each other in the café of Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid where Seamus had a reading. The following day they sat down for coffee and Heaney proposed they go for one more book; the translation he was working on of Book VI. This was finished shortly before Heaney’s death in August 2013 and the two had started working on the collector's edition with Hans van Eijk (Bonnefant Press).  It was the proofs from this draft that enabled the Heaney family/estate and Faber & Faber (official publisher of Heaney’s work) to decide on the ‘final’ edition which was published last year to international acclaim.

78 copies of the letterpress edition are being produced with 15 being available for sale in the UK.