For me, as I’m sure for so many other people, PN Review has been a doorway opening onto many things. I first met Michael in the early 2000s, when I was newly in Liverpool, working as a freelance editor and also trying to learn about poetry – as a writer, but, necessarily before that, as a reader. Michael needed a proofreader for the magazine and I was lucky enough to get the job. There could have been no better way to learn. The pages of PN Review opened up to me to a world of poems and poets, of thinking about poetry and what it can effect – a world of great depth and variety, seriousness and strangeness.

At the same time, of course, there was the very practical business of keeping the show on the road. If a poem is, as William Carlos Williams famously put it, a machine made of words, then a bimonthly poetry magazine is a kind of meta-machine, made of many smaller machines – poems and poets, budgets and deadlines, authors and editors, software, hardware, paper and ink and printing presses and warehouses and postal systems – many of which frequently seem to be pulling in different directions or indeed operating in different space-time continuums. Fixed points, Pole Stars, are hugely to be valued, and for me it was a particular pleasure to work closely with long-time PN Review typesetter Grant Shipcott, whose knowledge, reliability, and reassuring presence at the other end of the phone were an essential part of the machinery.

But the designer at the heart of it all, ...