50 Not Out

Fifty not out – fifty years, not fifty numbers! PN Review amazed me when I first got my hands on a copy. Sixty double-columned pages – I remember turning them in disbelief – it was No. 27, which is coming apart as I turn them now, with the beautiful cover lettering – PN REVIEW and 27 in inch-high green bold separated by one of three paragraphs of names and titles in red – and on the back cover, the other way round – what have we here? It was the first poetry magazine I came across – restricted to Peter Porter’s monthly round-up in the Observer – via Ashbery’s As We Know – another double-columned treasure-trove. PN Review and Carcanet have meant the world to me ever since. A Various Art, A Whole Bauble, Collected Poems by Lynette Roberts, Séan Rafferty and it was unwise to begin a list because where would it end?

In Poetry (London) No. 7, my other editorial hero, Tambimuttu, reflects, with Eliot at Faber and Faber in mind, on the ‘commercial limits to the poetry list a publisher can carry’: ‘A man of perception at a publishing house prints a few poets... He also publishes subsequent volumes of the poets’, but is now unable, owing to commercial limits, (and his just behaviour...) to encourage new poets ... as they “arrive”’. Carcanet has somehow defied gravity in publishing first and subsequent collections by ever more ‘new poets as they arrive’ – and time and again someone apparently long gone pops up with a resplendent Collected Poems.

How their editor has ...