Six Poetry Books That Faber & Faber Should Bring Back Into Print

And one they should make happen

This month sees a Changing of the Guard in British poetry: there is a new poetry editor at Faber & Faber. By appointing Lavinia Greenlaw, Faber have revived the tradition of a poet on their list also running it, as begun by its first editor, T.S. Eliot.

The new poetry editor (said the job ad) will “deliver a strategic vision for the entire list, including Faber’s extraordinary poetry backlist”. Faber could, at times, be said to lean a little heavily on this catalogue. In the 1990s, I remember an ad in Poetry Review which was simply famous Faber names in Roman type — T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott — with the strapline: “The list goes on…” And when the outgoing poetry editor, Matthew Hollis, announced his resignation, he made the following modest claim:

I am surely biased, but I know of no independent publishing activity for poetry anywhere in the world that feels quite so significant or so special.

The editors at independent poetry publishers such as Bloodaxe and Carcanet in the UK, or New Directions and Graywolf Press in the US, might raise an eyebrow at this, while casting an eye over their own extraordinary backlists.

And while Faber’s poetry register undoubtedly features some big names you can always buy, it is also packed with out-of-print titles. Last year, I offered my unsolicited advice on How to Be Faber Poetry Editor —

How to Be Faber Poetry Editor

— so I thought this week I’d suggest half-a-dozen books the new editor might want to recover from the vaults, plus one that a British publisher needs to make happen.

---

1. The Faber Book of Vernacular Verse (1990), ed. Tom Paulin

There was an eccentric entrepreneurial period between the Eighties and Nineties when Faber produced a series of hefty anthologies compiled from unexpected angles. Some were probably better as elevator pitches than actual reading — The Faber Book of Movie Verse (1993), for example — and some are probably best forgotten: the poet Sarah Maguire, reviewing The Faber Book of Blue Verse (1990), called it “a thorough piece of propaganda […] to put women off heterosexuality once and for all”, while Al Alvarez, the editor of The Faber Book of Modern European Verse (1992), struggled to find any female poets at work on the continent (he located two, in Austria and Russia).