Anne Ridler's Collected Poems were published by Carcanet in October. This conversation was recorded on 1 October 1994 at the house of Anne and her husband Vivian Ridler, who was Printer to the University of Oxford from 1958 to 1978 and now runs the Perpetua Press.

GREVEL LINDOP: Anne, we're celebrating the publication of your Collected Poems, on which many congratulations. The question that naturally comes to mind is how complete is the volume? Does it contain all the poems you've written?

ANNE RIDLER: It doesn't contain quite all, no. I always think it's rather a coy phrase, 'All that she wishes to preserve', but of course I write quite a lot of occasional poetry, I like writing acrostics and riddles, and that kind of thing. And there are one or two more serious poems which I cut out - for example two poems which appeared in my second book, The Nine Bright Shiners, written when our first child was a baby. They were an attempt at a kind of stream of consciousness of an infant. I remember this was adversely commented on by Scrutiny, who said putting in something like this showed that the claim that I could be put on a level with George Herbert was certainly not allowable! In themselves I think they're not bad, but probably in order not to be typecast as a poet of domesticity it's quite a good thing not to have them in.

It often ...