Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1999
15 x 10.7cm, 2pp, black on white card with a text:

l'invitation
de ce grand
espace blanc

Beken of Cowes was a photographer who specialised in marine photograph in the Solent and around the Isle of Wight. The "invitation to a large white space" is from a letter by Stephan Mallarme - one of the most important of concrete poets who used space to make meaning in his works. The comparison between the poet's work and the photography of seascapes is at the heart of this work. VG+

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Glasgow: Wax366, 1999
13.5 x 8.8cm, 12pp plus printed wrappers. String bound. Artist's book with four two-line poems.
For example

shellac-sealed
meadow-saffron

One of a small limitation - this example signed on the last page. VG+.

. VG+.

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Glasgow: Wax366, 1999
10 x 4cm, 16pp plus printed covers. Artist's book which reproduces eight line drawings of sycamore smara (the lobed seeds of the tree which fall to the ground in a spiral manner). A visual poem by the Scottish artist. This copy is signed in pencil on the last blank page. VG+.

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Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1999
11.5 x 8.6cm, 8pp, plus card covers and printed blue dust jacket. Three appropriated drawings of named boats by Gloria WIlson from as book published by Fishing News are printed below their names and a short paragraph describing the,. The names together read "PROSPERITY/LEAD US 11/AND GALILEE" which Finlay relates to both the life of Jesus and the Romantic poet Christina Rossetti who wrote many devotional texts.
The title "A WILD HAWTHORN RE-READER" alludes to the appropriation of another's work and a re-interpretation of it.

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Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1999
6.3 x 6.3cm, 4pp, printed black on blue. A drawing of an American warplane is joined by Finlay's poem internally:

Model

Port aileron down,
Starboard aileron up,
Slight left rudder -
Now it should fly straight!

Finlay describes a way in which an actual plane might guide itself through the air but at the end of the poem one realises the description is really the last alteration of the parts of the model he has just built. VG+.

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Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1999
7.3 x 7.3cm, 4pp, printed black on blue. A drawing of a cherry stone being flicked away by a finger is on the front. On the back Finlay notes that the German flying bombs, FZG 76, V-1 or doodle bugs were codenamed "Kirschkern" - which means cherry stone. These were rocket propelled and once launched there was no control of the missile - much as one find a flicked cherry stone when sent away in such manner. VG+

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Little Sparta: Wild Hawthorn Press, 1999.
29.5 x 14cm, 12pp plus cards and printed dust jacket. Artist's book with a poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and it's English translation by Samuel Taylor Coleridge which have linocut illustrations by Jo Hincks and then a variant on the poem by Finlay where the original poem's landscape is replaced by a scene of boats (which are blue lemons):

Do you know the land where the blue lemons ride
A silver fountain springs from the vessel's side?
There, in the stern, the orange net-floats glow,
The brown sail shifts, the salt winds gently blow.
DO you know it well, that land, beloved friend?
"Thither with thee, O, thither would I wend!"

The poem also is a thought of death and heaven. FInlay's version is also illustrated by Hincks - making the boat references more obvious (the fountain for example is the bilge water spraying out)>
VG+ example.

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