The North Ship

The North Ship is the debut collection of poems by Philip Larkin (1922–1985), published in 1945 by Reginald A. Caton's Fortune Press.

[1] Caton did not pay his writers and expected them to buy a certain number of copies themselves.

Some of the poems were composed while Larkin was an undergraduate at the University of Oxford, but the bulk were written in the period 1943 to 1944 when he was running the public library in Wellington, Shropshire, and writing his second novel A Girl in Winter.

In the 1966 reissue an extra poem, "Waiting for breakfast, while she brushed her hair" was added at the end.

[1] The North Ship constitutes the first part of the 2003 edition of Larkin's Collected Poems.